writing a module to feed entropy /dev/random

[John-Mark Gurney]

Johnny Cho wrote this message on Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 14:37 +0900:
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 2:17 PM, John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:
> > Johnny Cho wrote this message on Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 14:13 +0900:
> >> I'm Johnny Cho, a FreeBSD user in Korea.
> >>
> >> A friend of mine in Washington DC asked me to spread his word to
> >> FreeBSD community.
> >>
> >> He is looking for someone to write a module to feed entropy
> >> /dev/random with an Alea-1 USB entropy device.
> >>
> >> any help/comment/blame would be most welcome.
> >
> > Does all the data read from /dev/random need to come from the Alea-1
> > device? or does it just need to contribute to the entropy pool?  If
> > the later, than a simple daemon that every few seconds reads a few
> > hundred bytes from the USB device (via libusb) and writes it to
> > /dev/random should be enough...
> >
> > If the former then it'll be a bit more work...
> >
> > Is he looking for a voluteer? or is he willing to pay someone for the
> > work?
> 
> As far as I'm understanding based on his word, the former is more
> likely what he wants.
> He's found some trials by someone in the community, but the trials
> seems to be given up.
> 
> He is willing to pay for this.

Does he want this all in kernel? or is most of it in userland fine?

Is this the device?
http://www.araneus.fi/products-alea-eng.html

If he's fine w/ a userland implementation, using CUSE4BSD, then it's
pretty easy as I've started writing a python front end to CUSE4BSD and
integrating libusb shouldn't be to hard...  If he needs it integrated
into the kernel, then it'll be a bit more difficult as I'm not familar
w/ the kernel USB side of things...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."