New entropy source proposal.
Pawel Jakub Dawidek
pjd at FreeBSD.org
Mon Mar 7 13:03:33 GMT 2005
Hi.
I've been playing a bit with "use sound card as an entropy source" idea.
This simple program does what I wanted:
http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/sndrand.tbz
The program is very simple, it should be run with two arguments:
% sndtest /dev/dspW 1048576 > rand.data
This command will generate 1MB of random data.
With my sound card:
pcm0: <Intel ICH3 (82801CA)> port 0xe100-0xe13f,0xe000-0xe0ff irq 11 at device 31.5 on pci0
pcm0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
pcm0: <Cirrus Logic CS4299 AC97 Codec>
It produce very good entropy. I tried those tests to prove its quality:
- FIPS 140-2 tests
- 'ent' tests: http://www.fourmilab.ch/random/
- Famous 'diehard' tests
The full output from diehard tests is here:
http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/sndrand_diehard.txt
The idea of using sound card as entropy source was taken from RFC 1750.
If people like the idea and someone more skilled than me in this subject
can review this stuff, we can start to put it into kernel
"random infrastructure". It could also be implemented as userland daemon
which writes collected entropy to /dev/random maybe...
--
Pawel Jakub Dawidek http://www.wheel.pl
pjd at FreeBSD.org http://www.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD committer Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/attachments/20050307/c1239433/attachment.bin
More information about the freebsd-security
mailing list