Nmap Announce mailing list archives
Potential source of randomness on the systems that do not have one built in.
From: "Stanislav N. Vardomskiy" <stany () pet notbsd org>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 13:40:57 -0400 (EDT)
I was trying to get GNU Privacy Guard to compile on a Solaris box today. As you might know, Solaris doesn't have /dev/random or /dev/urandom that would be capable to provide a source of strong entropy, and consequently random number generation or "seeding" or an encryption algorithm is potentiall flawed due to that OS weakness. I was surprized to find out that GPG people have already attempted to solve that problem with EGD - Entropy Gathering Daemon, a daemon that runs in userspace and gathers kernel statistics (number of packets travelling through the interface, output of `w`, `vmstat`, etc), using them as a source of entropy. For a short while, when run on non-Linux/*BSD* OS, nmap was complaining about not being able to find /dev/random or /dev/urandom, consequently the order in which the ports were scanned was not truly random (I think I am getting this right. Please forgive me if I am wrong here ;-). In a revision or two that warning was removed due to complaints from the users, me included. Now, I am wondering it it would be possible and a good idea to make `nmap` detect the presence of EGD, and, in event that it is running, make use of it as a source of cryptographically strong random numbers on OSes that lack a kernel level /dev/random. BTW, URL for EGD is <http://www.lothar.com/tech/crypto/> Signed: //Stany, System Administrator working for HIM. -- +-------+ Stanislav N Vardomskiy - Procurator Odiosus Ex Infernis[TM] +-------+ | "Backups we have; it's restores that we find tricky." Richard Letts at ASR | | This message is powered by JOLT! For all the sugar and twice the caffeine. | +--------+ My words are my own. LARTs are provided free of charge. +---------+
Current thread:
- Potential source of randomness on the systems that do not have one built in. Stanislav N. Vardomskiy (Jul 29)
- Overview of NMAP Lamont Granquist (Aug 20)
- Re: Overview of NMAP Max Vision (Aug 20)
- Overview of NMAP Lamont Granquist (Aug 20)