Questions about key generation and RNG

Christoph Anton Mitterer calestyo at scientia.net
Wed Aug 11 16:46:51 CEST 2010


btw: I've we're already asking questions about the RNG... I'd have also
one since some time now:

I once tried to understand the code ( ^^ )... and when I create a key
(--gen-key)... gpg seems to call rndlinux_gather_random (on systems having
/dev/random) in order to get it's entropy, right?
Now when the level parameter is <= 2 (IIRC) than urandom is used instead
of /dev/random.

It seems that during key generation both happens, and at least once it is
called with level=0.

Why? And does this have any negative security impact?


Thanks,
Chris.



More information about the Gnupg-devel mailing list