Netscape "random" number seed generator code available

Jon Mittelhauser jonm at netscape.com
Mon Sep 25 11:19:15 PDT 1995


adam at lighthouse.homeport.org (Adam Shostack) wrote:
>Jeff Weinstein wrote:
>| 
>|   More on the RNG stuff.  On Unix systems we look for ~/.pgp/randseed.bin,
>| and feed it through the RNG hash.  On Unix and PC systems we feed the
>| environment through the hash, so that would be a good place for a
>| concerned user to put some random stuff of their own.
>
>On a SunOS (or any BSD) box ps -e will get you environment variables.
>
>ps -eaxuw
>USER       PID %CPU %MEM   SZ  RSS TT STAT START  TIME COMMAND
>root        53  0.0  0.0   68    0 ?  IW   Sep 19  0:02 portmap HOME=/
>PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/etc:/usr/ucb
>root        68  0.0  0.0   16    0 ?  I    Sep 19  0:00  (biod)
>root        58  0.0  0.0   40    0 ?  IW   Sep 19  0:00 keyserv HOME=/
>PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/etc:/usr/ucb

If you take a look at the code you will see that this (and a ton of
other things) are already being done...Jeff is only pointing out
an extra item which is of special interest to the people in this
group...we are no longer relying on any single item of data but
rather a very large set and constant re-seeding during idle loops...

-Jon








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