/dev/random question

[Chuck Swiger]

On Sep 13, 2007, at 1:57 PM, Per olof Ljungmark wrote:
>> On the website it says that the original yarrow algorithm is no  
>> longer
>> supported. It seems to have been replaced by the fortuna algorithm.
>> I can't see from the source if /usr/src/sys/dev/random/yarrow.*  
>> use the
>> original yarrow algorithm, or the improved yarrow-160 aka fortuna.  
>> The use of
>> crypto/rijndael/rijndael-api-fst.h and crypto/sha2/sha2.h seem to
>> indicate the latter though.
>
> Should I conclude then that randomness is sufficient and  
> performance is a non-issue?

The randomness is considered to be strong, but you can perform the  
NIST FIPS-140 tests against /dev/random and decide for yourself.  As  
for performance, I get about 12MB/s out of /dev/random on a ~1 GHz  
CPU, which seems to be quite decent...

-- 
-Chuck