PRNG on FreeBSD
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Thu Oct 5 05:14:04 PDT 2006
On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Ricardo Nabinger Sanchez wrote:
> Snooping around Wikipedia, I got curious about if it'd worth the effort
> going from Yarrow [1] to Fortuna [2] algorithm, as the authors (seems to)
> claim that the latter is better/more secure.
>
> As someone (me) who knows very little on how to effectively compromise a
> PRNG, what are the tradeoffs? Yarrow is simpler/faster than Fortuna?
Yarrow is an older PRNG algorithm, and Fortuna is (as I understand it)
generally considered its successor. Mark Murray (CC'd), who implemented our
current /dev/random and Yarrow code, has been working on a Fortuna
implementation for FreeBSD.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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