Re: Entropy Pool Contents

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Phillip Susi wrote:

I ran into this the other day myself and when I investigated the kernel code, I found that writes to /dev/random do accept the data into the entropy pool, but do NOT update the entropy estimate. In order to do that, you have to use a root only ioctl to add the data and update the estimate. I am not sure why this is, or if there is a tool already written somewhere to use this ioctl, maybe someone else can comment?

I believe the idea was that you don't want random users being able to artificially inflate your entropy count. So the kernel tries to make use of entropy entered by regular users (by stirring it into the pool) but it doesn't increase the entropy estimate unless root says its okay.

Chris
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