Re: [PATCH] API for true Random Number Generators to add entropy (2.6.11)

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 20:30 +1000, Herbert Xu wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 12:21:04PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > 
> > What catastrophic consequences? Noone is likely to even *notice*, and
> > it does not help practical attack at all. Unless hardware RNGs are
> > *very* flakey (like, more flakey than harddrives), this is not a problem.
> 
> The reason some people use hardware RNGs in the first place is because
> they don't trust the software RNGs.  When the hardware RNG fails but
> continues to send data to /dev/random, /dev/random essentially degenerates
> into a software RNG.  Now granted /dev/random is a pretty good software
> RNG, however, for some purposes it just isn't good enough.

I think the most people use hardware accelerated devices to
speed up theirs calculations - embedded world is the best example - 
applications that are written to use /dev/random
will work just too slow, so hardware vendors
place HW assistant chips to unload that very cpu-intencive work
from main CPU.
Without ability speed this up in kernel, we completely [ok, almost] 
loose all RNG advantages.

-- 
        Evgeniy Polyakov

Crash is better than data corruption -- Arthur Grabowski

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part


[Index of Archives]     [Kernel Newbies]     [Netfilter]     [Bugtraq]     [Photo]     [Stuff]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Video 4 Linux]     [Linux for the blind]     [Linux Resources]
  Powered by Linux