[Cerowrt-devel] New random number generator for linux...

[Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>]

This new design for a rng actually appears to be pretty reasonable.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.cryptoapi/9878

Full details, paper, and code patches here:

http://www.chronox.de/

I am (as usual) low on time to package it up for openwrt, or patch it
into the kernel, and try it. I will probably be able to get around to
it next weekend if nobody beats me to it, slamming it into my pie
build for x86 first.

I'd be very interested if some folk could compare the standalone
daemon to rngd on their favorite platform? And if anyone here has the
chops to think hard about the algo, that would be nice, too...

In other news , theodore ts'o's got a whole bunch more new patches for
the random driver on kernel.org that I HAVE patched in and am trying
to get into the next cero release. Fixes for get_cycles(), arrived
already in mainline, and the mips patch is around somewhere.

While that stuff improves the quality of the entropy in the system,
the above rng would bring *more* entropy into the system, maybe get
rid of the existing daemon (or integrate with it) and/or hostapd
patches, etc, which I find exciting. That said, validating rng stuff
is *hard*.

-- 
Dave Täht

Fixing bufferbloat with cerowrt: http://www.teklibre.com/cerowrt/subscribe.html