testing quality of a /dev/random

[Sam Roberts]

Ok, so this test doesn't work, and I'm back with the questions
I started with.

The gnupg web site claims that Linux's /dev/random is suitable
for a high quality source of entropy. My driver uses the same
code, just using QNX-specific ways of detecting an irq
event and calling the function to mix in some irq entropy. Linux
calls this function when it detects (in linux-specific ways) that
the irq has occurred.

My questions, then and again, are:

- why do people think that Linux's dev/random is of high quality?
- how was it tested?
- how, if it is possible at all, do I demonstrate that my port generates
  random data of the same quality?

It appears to me that only consideration of the source code and
the means of detecting random events can be used to convince
yourself the output is random.

I also don't see why the linux driver is as complex as it is.

I think I could just grap the TSC on
every irq, take the lowest order bit, and add to the entropy pool
bit by bit. I'd then link urandom to random. This might be slower
in gathering entropy, but every bit in the entropy pool would
correspond to whether the irq handler sample the TSC on an odd
or even instruction cycle, which has got to be random. The Linux
code does the same, but it adds all bits of the time difference to
the entropy pool, even though many of those bits will not be random,
and then attempts to compensate for this using an algorithm that
is undocumented (every other alogorithm in the driver
comes with a reference to it's source, and some discussion,
the estimate of randomness function is just there, with a comment
saying that it's estimating the amount of randomness added to
the pool).

And from a less technical point-of-view:

- is it possible to have this included in a contrib directory?
- is there some other distribution technique you'd like (I could
  stick it on QNXs site, but unless you add a note to the web
  page or the INSTALL note, users of gpg won't know it exists).

Thanks,
Sam

--
Sam Roberts, sam at cogent dot ca, www.cogent.ca

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org>
To: <gnupg-devel at gnupg.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 5:36 AM
Subject: Re: testing quality of a /dev/random


> On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, Enzo Michelangeli wrote:
> 
> > Such kind of tests, at best, prove how bad a (P)RNG is, not how good: the
> > (very deterministic) digits of PI would pass your tests with flying colours.
> > Determining an lower bound for the entropy of a data source based only on
> > the data stream is a non-computable problem.
> 
> And remember that the output from /dev/random transfers the SHA-1
> mixinf function.  There is no way to measure the entropy outside the
> kernel.
> 
>    Werner
> 
>