Entropy collection in sshd (was Re: Entropy and DSA key)

[Lutz Jaenicke]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 08:57:01PM +0100, Gert Doering wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 12:48:53PM -0500, Ed Phillips wrote:
> > I'm not following you... the problem of "it takes 2 freakin minutes to get
> > logged into my SS1+" is a direct result of entropy collection performed by
> > sshd.  
> 
> No, it's not.  I use NetBSD on a Sparc LX with /dev/random, and ssh takes
> still 2 minutes - the delay is NOT caused by the random number generation
> but by slow crypto on ancient Sparc hardware.  ssh protocol 1 is much
> quicker (and also needs random).

I is hard to comment about a platform I don't know in detail, but I tend
to sit in front of a good old HP 9000/710 (1991?), 50MHz. It took me
some tries, but by tuning OpenSSL's flags I could gain a great deal
of performance. Have a look into the BN_LLONG and company flags.
Two minutes seems to be really slow to me.

Best regards,
	Lutz
-- 
Lutz Jaenicke                             Lutz.Jaenicke at aet.TU-Cottbus.DE
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