[Cryptography] /dev/random has issues

[coderman]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 9:39 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> ... I didn't want to look at /dev/random at all,
> but eventually I had to, because I couldn't figure out a
> way to feed it entropy without huge amounts of waste.
> AFAICT that isn't possible in the current version, although
> this is a fixable problem.
> ...
> I have a prototype ("alpha") version of random.c that
> addresses most of these issues.


this would be useful. heavy consumers of /dev/random and the entropy
daemons trying to keep it full a paying quite an efficiency penalty in
the current implementation.



> A word about the article by Dodis et al. claiming that
> /dev/random is "not robust".  IMHO that is a red herring.
> It raises issues that have little direct importance....


... but it makes for such a provocative paper!