2 ms·
There's been a lot of papers about urandom being a broken pool. They need to adopt something like Fortuna or one of the more modern formalisms of Fortuna.
by blazespin 12y ago
There's been a lot of papers about urandom being a broken pool. They need to adopt something like Fortuna or one of the more modern formalisms of Fortuna.
- tptacek 12y agoThe Linux urandom pool is managed almost identically to the random pool. The fact that random is "safe" (if blocking makes you safe) immediately after cold boot is actually just a side effect.
- pbsd 12y agoWhat those papers (or at least the ones I think you're talking about) deal with is something slightly more nuanced than what is being discussed here. They analyze how the pool recovers from a compromise, i.e., if you somehow manage to dump its entire state how quickly can you gather entropy again to minimize the damage. It turns out Fortuna and variants thereof score very well in this metric, but this does not have any bearing on the quality of the output, or whether it loses entropy by generating more bytes.