Re: Not enough entropy in RNG

[Derek L Davies <ddavies@ddavies.net>]

I've got /dev/random and /dev/urandom as well as a running egd .  Now
I'm looking for a suitable trick to hook egd's TCPIP port to
/dev/random (and /dev/urandom).  While looking I found:

http://mel.interspace.dk/~sune/hurd/entropy.html

I haven't tried it or even looked at the code, but it looks like they
did a fair amount of work (ostensibly duplicating the work Marcus did
to hack up {u}random).  There's something called egd_glue that looks
like it does the hooking up of TCPIP to the /dev/ files.  Does anyone
have any comments on this work?

I would say the egd_glue part looks a bit suspisious to me.  It seems
like the cleaner thing to do would be to have the {u}random
translators recogzize some flag, say, --egd <host:port>, and read the
data directly.  But maybe that would make it so that people couldn't
write data to the translator while egd is writing to it or cause some
other undesirable interference that I'm not anticipating?  I have the
sneaking suspicion I'm missing something ;-)

Before I go on with this can anyone comment?  Does Sune's work have
anything that Marcus's does not?  (If people don't know about Sune's
stuff I will dig in more and try to find out what it's got and then
merge Marcus and Sune's stuff together if it makes sense, but just
from reading the announcements in entropy.html I think I would
probably just go the way of modifying Marcus' stuff and leaveing the
other stuff alone since it doesn't seem to add anything new/better.

Thanks,
Derek

--