0.9.1

[Werner Koch]

Brian Warner <warner at lothar.com> writes:

> If we turned the rndunix code into a persistent daemon, with a pair of unix
> sockets to correspond to /dev/random and /dev/urandom, couldn't that drop into

That's the way we do it.  It also has the advantage that we don't have
to care about GPL/cryptlib license conflicts.  I'd suggest not to call
it /tmp/[u]random but /tmp/[u]entropy  and use a message format to
pass information about the entroy quality along with the bytes of
entropy.

What's need is a buffer as the entropy pool.  The /dev/random code
together with the current rndunix.c is a goof starting point for such 
a daemon.

Brian - do you have the time to work on it? 

> There would be issues of "should it be started automatically" and if so,
> should it die automatically, but users (like me) who know what it does would

Print a message that the user should either ask the sysadm to install
the daemon or to put it into his ~/.profile. - ah yes: we need an
option (or better an environment var) to tell GnupG the name of the
sockets. 

> Except for the lack of the special ioctls (to measure or change entropy
> count), would such a device be at all discernible from the real kernel-based
> /dev/random?

No and given the fact that the kernel based /dev/random is only used
to seed the GnuPG RNG there is should be not much difference.


  Werner