On 7/3/06, Luc Maisonobe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Martin van den Bemt wrote :
> I read somewhere that linux will speed up doing encryption when eg the
> keyboard is used (those tokens are used in the linux SecureRandom
> generator.
Hmm...I guess I would have to really fess up to my *real* strategy for
the nightlies to make this work (typing at the keyboard each night) -
:D
It is true when the generator is based on bytes read from the
/dev/random device, false when /dev/urandom device is used. The former
can block read access when the entropy pool gathering environmental
noise is empty. This pool is replenished when events caused by keyboard
use, mouse motion and interrupts from disk or other devices. This is the
price to pay for cryptographically secure randomness except if you
motherborad has some hardware-based random generator chip supported by
the kernel (I think there are some) ... However this is far beyond the
scope of this list.
I wonder if that is what causes the big delay in
setSecureRandomAlgorithm. Sounds plausible actually, if Ubuntu is
trying to seed the secure random generator with environment noise.
Interesting. The code to set / reset is well-tested in any case and
unchanged for a long time, so I don't see it as a big loss to suspend
the test. Thanks for the info, though.
Phil
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