svn commit: r239569 - head/etc/rc.d

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> 3. Write a script to reboot, and once the system is fully booted do 'dd
> if=/dev/random of=saved-random-out.$i count=4096' then reboot again
> immediately. Values of i from 1 to 10,000 ought to do it.
> 4. sha256 the saved-random-out files and see how many duplicates there are.

I doubt there will be any exact duplicates, but closer statistical
analysis might reveal a slight bias.  For instance, if my intuition
serves, the Hamming distance between any pair of samples, when averaged
over a large number of samples, should be half the sample length.  I'm
sure a professional statistician or cryptanalyst could come up with more
accurate ways of detecting bias.

The script in question, by the way, could simply be a few extra lines at
the end of /etc/rc.d/initrandom; and I'd do it in a VM, to reduce cycle
time to a minimum.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no