GnuPG RNG on Windows

[Werner Koch]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006 02:10, Joe Vender said:

> An I correct in assuming that, on Linux, GnuPG uses the Linux OS RNG which
> starts with the OS and runs as a service constantly stirring the random
> pool, but on Windows, GnuPG uses the RNG included with the source and the
> random pool only gets stirred when GnuPG is called?

No, it is far more complicated than that.  I don't have the time to
elaborate on it now.  If you are interested, you should study
cipher/random.c from libgcrypt which is a bit better documented.  For
a general description of the RNG architecture see Peter Gutmann's
paper: "Software Generation of Practically Strong Random Numbers". See
also chapter 6 in his book "Cryptographic Security Architecture", New
York, 2004, ISBN 0-387-95387-6.  His website is at
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/.

I could post a brief writeup on the implementation, however this is in
German.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner