On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 21:42 +0100, Roberto Ragusa wrote: > Tony Nelson wrote: > > On 10-01-07 12:40:02, Roberto Ragusa wrote: > >> Luca wrote: > >>> Hi all, > >>> if I simply write to /dev/random, will that increase the entropy > >>> of my system? (I'm assuming that the data I'm writing are random > >>> and that somehow I got them). > >> Wikipedia says so. > >> > >> My tests say no. > >> > >> In particular this brutal approach does not increase the entropy > >> cat /dev/urandom >/dev/random > >> (it is stupid to do that, I know, but it's just a test) > > ... > > > > `man 4 random` says that the current entropy can be read and written > > from /dev/urandom, not /dev/random. This is used to preserver entropy > > across reboots. > > That's true. > But as far as I can see neither writing to random nor to urandom will > increase the entropy availability. AFAIK the purpose of writing to /dev/urandom is simply to preserve the entropy state across reboots (at least that's the standard example). There's no implication that it "increases the entropy". The effect of writing to /dev/random doesn't seem to be defined. poc -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
