New entropy source proposal.

[David Schultz]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005, Richard Coleman wrote:
> Ian G wrote:
> >You might want to check out:
> >
> >http://www.av8n.com/turbid/paper/turbid.htm
> >
> >There is some controversy over the new FreeBSD /dev/random system,
> >is there any analysis of the system?  I wasn't able to find anything
> >from a brief search.
> >
> >iang
> 
> The FreeBSD /dev/random was originally based on the Yarrow paper that is 
> given as a reference in the paper above.  But I think the current 
> implementation is more similar to to the version of Yarrow that is 
> discussed in Bruce Schneier's "Practical Cryptography".  I'm not sure if 
> that is a coincidence or not.
> 
> The paper mentioned above only briefly mentions Yarrow, and doesn't 
> mention the FreeBSD implementation, so it's hard to compare the two.
> 
> At first glance, both systems appear strong.

There's also:

	http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/bsdcon02/full_papers/murray/murray_html/

The only objection with it that I'm aware of is that the random
device does not ordinarily block, which may make it vulnerable to
side channel or cryptanalytic attacks.