On Oct 22, 2013, at 9:06 PM, Ted Unangst <t...@tedunangst.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 18:31, William Orr wrote: >> You'll notice that there's no significant difference between the output >> of the two rngs. However, with octrng the dd completed in under a minute >> (more entropy in pool). Without, it took several minutes. If you want >> time output, I can add that as well. > > This doesn't make sense, because that's not how the random device > works. The bits userland reads come from a stream cipher (rc4). > Always. Regardless of any entropy calculations. The cipher is reseeded > from time to time, again regardless of the amount of entropy. No > matter how much entropy there is, a lot or a little or none at all, > the device always produces output at the same speed. > I guess I misunderstood, as I thought that /dev/random dumped the entropy pool, and that /dev/arandom put the random data through a stream cipher so that grabbing random data would never block. I can do this again with time, but pulling data from /dev/random took significantly longer without my patch than with it.
signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
