Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: /dev/random is probably not
From: Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt () freeshell org>
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 11:37:00 +0000 (UTC)
On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Jack Lloyd wrote:
Assuming the PRNG is any good, it shouldn't matter if an attacker can manipulate such timings, because (by definition) a good PRNG will still behave correctly even if an attacker does feed it lots of deliberately bad data (as long as the PRNG also has been fed with a sufficient amount of unguessable 'good' input as well, of course).
In the case of Linux, this still causes the estimate of how much 'good' entropy is in the pool to be inflated. Some applications may rely on the fact that /dev/random is backed by 'real' entropy, whereas /dev/urandom can be pure PRNG output.
IMO, all this discussion is well and good, but it would be much more productive for someone to settle the question empirically.
Alexey
Current thread:
- Re: /dev/random is probably not, (continued)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Kai Howells (Jul 08)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Stefan Bethke (Jul 08)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Francesco Messineo (Jul 12)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Zow (Jul 04)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Anton Ivanov (Jul 05)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not devnull (Jul 06)
- RE: /dev/random is probably not David Schwartz (Jul 05)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Glynn Clements (Jul 05)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not ChayoteMu (Jul 06)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Jack Lloyd (Jul 05)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Alexey Toptygin (Jul 06)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Chris Kuethe (Jul 06)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Thomas (Jul 06)
- RE: /dev/random is probably not David Schwartz (Jul 08)