Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2007 16:55:02 +0000
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: "Ray Lee" <ray@madrabbit.org>
Cc: "Adrian Bunk" <bunk@kernel.org>, "Matt Mackall" <mpm@selenic.com>,
       "Marc Haber" <mh+linux-kernel@zugschlus.de>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Why does reading from /dev/urandom deplete entropy so much?
Message-ID: <20071204165502.0a8f695e@the-village.bc.nu>
In-Reply-To: <2c0942db0712040854u17a830b9see663742b2716457@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20071204114125.GA17310@torres.zugschlus.de>
	<20071204161811.GB15974@stusta.de>
	<2c0942db0712040854u17a830b9see663742b2716457@mail.gmail.com>
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> cryptographically strong stream it'll provide when /dev/random is
> tapped? In principle, this'd leave more entropy available for
> applications that really need it, especially on platforms that don't
> generate a lot of entropy in the first place (servers).


As reported about a month ago, the evidence is that the /dev/random
stream is not cryptographically strong. Collecting uuids generated from
the kernel uuid random generator from the random generator in the kernel
shows abnormal patterns of duplicates.

Alan
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