Re: entropy gathering (was Re: Why does reading from /dev/urandom deplete entropy so much?)

Willy Tarreau
2007-12-08T20:44:51Z

On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 02:36:33PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
> As an aside...
>
> Speaking as the maintainer rng-tools, which is the home of the hardware
> RNG entropy gathering daemon...
>
> I wish somebody (not me) would take rngd and several other projects, and
> combine them into a single actively maintained "entropy gathering" package.
>
> IMO entropy gathering has been a long-standing need for headless network
> servers (and now virtual machines).
>
> In addition to rngd for hardware RNGs, I've been daemons out there that
> gather from audio and video sources (generally open wires/channels with
> nothing plugged in), thermal sources, etc. There is a lot of entropy
> that could be gathered via userland, if you think creatively.

I remember having installed openssh on an AIX machines years ago, and
being amazed by the number of sources it collected entropy from. Simple
commands such as "ifconfig -a", "netstat -i" and "du -a", "ps -ef", "w"
provided a lot of entropy.

Regards,
Willy