EGD requirement a show stopper for me

[Gary E. Miller]

Yo Niels!

I think we basically agree, except you missed one point.  SCO has no
/dev/random, so open-ssh has no way of reseeding except with EGD.  The
problem is to find a portable way to reseed the PNRG on all UNIX hosts,
even those with no /dev/random and without the problems of EGD.

RGDS
GARY

On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Niels Provos wrote:

> Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2000 09:16:38 -0500
> From: Niels Provos <provos at citi.umich.edu>
> To: gary miller <gem at rellim.com>
> Cc: Dave Dykstra <dwd at bell-labs.com>, openssh-unix-dev at mindrot.org
> Subject: Re: EGD requirement a show stopper for me 
> 
> In message <Pine.LNX.4.21.0002011450370.22282-100000 at ns1.aplatform.com>, "Gary 
> E. Miller" writes:
> >FreeS/WAN struggled with this issue for a while and then decided
> >to just go with /dev/random.  open-ssh does not have that option.
> OpenSSH uses the alleged RC4 stream cipher to stretch the randomness
> provided by /dev/random into a longer interval.  This is a sane
> approach and as far as I can see is practially as secure as the
> mathematical requirements for pseudo-random generators.  Furthermore,
> RC4's internal state is reseeded fairly often from /dev/random.
> Looking at purely statistical tests, using RC4 is far better than the
> raw output from /dev/random - at least the last time that I checked on
> it.
> 
> Niels.
> 

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Gary E. Miller Rellim 20340 Empire Ave, Suite E-3, Bend, OR 97701
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