Prime Generation

[Pete Chown]

Peter Gutmann wrote:

> It
> seems to be a matter of personal preference, SSLeay and GPG use a new random
> number, I use the current one + delta in order to avoid draining entropy but
> there's no overwhelming reason to favour one over the other.

Currently gpg seems to have a problem getting enough entropy to
generate a key; this was my reason for looking into it in the first
place.  When I generated a 2048-bit key, it ran out of entropy several
times and needed to be restarted by typing on the keyboard.

With SSLeay/OpenSSL it is a bit different because (as I understand it)
it relies on the security of its pseudo-random sequence generator.  In
effect it is more like the base plus delta arrangement because each
candidate prime is derived from a single starting point which in its
case is the entropy pool.

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