Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753416AbXLIOFw (ORCPT ); Sun, 9 Dec 2007 09:05:52 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751099AbXLIOFo (ORCPT ); Sun, 9 Dec 2007 09:05:44 -0500 Received: from ns2.uludag.org.tr ([193.140.100.220]:46273 "EHLO uludag.org.tr" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751459AbXLIOFn convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Sun, 9 Dec 2007 09:05:43 -0500 From: Ismail =?utf-8?q?D=C3=B6nmez?= Organization: Pardus / KDE To: Theodore Tso , Adrian Bunk , Bill Davidsen , Marc Haber , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Why does reading from /dev/urandom deplete entropy so much? Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2007 16:06:49 +0200 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.6 (enterprise 0.20071123.740460) References: <20071204114125.GA17310@torres.zugschlus.de> <200712090821.16483.ismail@pardus.org.tr> <20071209123147.GZ17037@thunk.org> In-Reply-To: <20071209123147.GZ17037@thunk.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200712091606.50089.ismail@pardus.org.tr> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1221 Lines: 27 Sunday 09 December 2007 14:31:47 tarihinde Theodore Tso şunları yazmıştı: > On Sun, Dec 09, 2007 at 08:21:16AM +0200, Ismail Dönmez wrote: > > My understanding was if you can drain entropy from /dev/urandom any > > futher reads from /dev/urandom will result in data which is not random at > > all. Is that wrong? > > Past a certain point /dev/urandom will stat returning results which > are cryptographically random. At that point, you are depending on the > strength of the SHA hash algorithm, and actually being able to not > just to find hash collisions, but being able to trivially find all or > most possible pre-images for a particular SHA hash algorithm. If that > were to happen, it's highly likely that all digital signatures and > openssh would be totally broken. Thats very good news, thanks for the detailed explanation. Time to update common misconceptions. Regards, ismail -- Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/