Bug#672347: RFP: video-entropyd -- program to add entropy data from video4linux devices

[Francois Marier <francois@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

* Package name    : video-entropyd
  Version         : 2.0
  Upstream Author : Folkert van Heusden <folkert@vanheusden.com>
* URL             : http://www.vanheusden.com/ved/
* License         : GPL
  Programming Lang: C
  Description     : program to add entropy data from video4linux devices

For security reasons (when doing network traffic or generating secure keys for example) one wants as much entropy-data in the kernel random-driver as possible. The random-driver takes partially care for this. But in situations in where there's a lot of demand for entropy-data, it might not be able to gather enough entropy-data by itself.

That's where this program is for: adding entropy-data to the kernel-driver. It does that by fetching 2 images from a video4linux-device (with a random delay in between), calculating the difference between those two and then calculating the number of information-bits in that data. After that, the data with the number-of-entropy-bits is submitted to the kernel-random-driver.

After that, the program exits (when run from crontab) or sleeps a random time before redoing the same process.