>>> Modify the source :)
>>
>> Very bad answer.
>
> And also a wrong one. Your application can always call RAND_add().
Sorry for mistake.
And this is a very good answer. Perhaps this guidance deserves being documented
somewhere besides this mailing list? Something along the lines of
“RNG Seed Sources can be set by --with-rand-seed. “os” is the default source.
Sources are tried until enough bits of randomness have been collected. If you
want to mix data from a particular source into the seed, but don’t want to make
that source exclusive – use RAND_add() method.”
> This is a mostly volunteer open source project.
Yeah, I realize and appreciate that.
> We are unlikely to commit to something that requires so much effort
I’m not sure I agree here. What effort are you talking about? In order to
select an order in which available sources are queried, the developers had to
think (hopefully :). Those thought could be documented in a few lines of text.
> when, frankly, most of the consumers aren’t interested, or qualified, to make
> an assessment.
So they’ll be happy with the default. Fine with me. ;-)
> I am sorry if that sounds obnoxious or conceited. It shouldn’t; there are
> many things that I know I’m not qualified to comment on :) And also, we
> reserve the right to make changes.
No offense taken. But you “freeze” interface to and behavior of ciphers and
cipher modes, for example. This (how you seed RNG that provides keys to those)
is at least equally important. It’s not a minute detail that nobody should care
about or nose in.
So while the team clearly has the right to make changes (especially before the
interface became public ;), but I’d rather that such changes are guided by an
informed consent from the public (such as yours truly ;).
> I expect that the FIPS project, just starting, will be of interest to you.
Thank you – indeed it is of interest. (Though I see FIPS more as a curse than
as a blessing ;-).
One important thing I missed earlier:
> We also added a separate global DRBG for private key generation and added
> API’s to use it.
> This object isn’t reachable directly, but it is used by the new BN_priv_rand
> and BN_priv_rand_range API’s.
> Those API’s, in turn, are used by all private-key generating functions.
I think it is *imperative* for a user to be able to RAND_add() to the DRBG that
gnerates private keys. I cannot emphasize enough how critical this is.
smime.p7s
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