/dev/random - using up entropy?
Wei Dai
weidai at eskimo.com
Sat Nov 4 17:10:47 PST 1995
On Sat, 4 Nov 1995, Bill Stewart wrote:
> Most of the designs I've seen look like this:
> A Reservoir of entropy R = R1....Rn, where n is large, 1024 or 4096
> An input stream I = I1....Ik, which is mixed into R
> A mixing function F which is used to mix R <= F(R,I)
> for some chunk of I, possibly empty.
> A hash function H, typically MD5.
> An output O = O1...Om = H(R), and E gets mixed after every output.
> (These are capital-o, not zero...)
I believe PGP uses this approach. An implementation of it can also be
found in Crypto++ as randpool.cpp.
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