Re: randomdev entropy gathering is really weak

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Jeroen C. van Gelderen" writes
:

>> Predicting the clock's offset from reality and the two way path to
>> the server of choice is impossible, plus if people enable authentication
>> later on the packets will be choke full of high-quality entropy.
>
>Please quantify 'impossible'.

People have tried for 30+ years to predict what a quartz xtal
will do next.  Nobody expects any chance of success.  Add to this
the need to predict the difference between one or more NTP servers
and your local qartz xtal and I think we can safely say "impossible".

>I think we first need to figure out the security implications.

I think the security implications of having no entropy are much
worse than having entropy which a truly superhuman *maybe* could
guess *some* of the bits in, are far worse.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
[EMAIL PROTECTED]         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD coreteam member | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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