Random seed for symetric encryption

[Werner Koch]

On Tue, 17 Jan 2006 10:06:18 +0100, Nikolaus Rath said:

> Yes, exactly. About 2 GB in 14000 files.

You are running several concurrent gpg processes?

>> [6] The exact message again (I lost it) that GPG gives you
>> when the random fails.

> I don't have the exact message here at the moment, but I'm pretty sure
> that it literally complained about an "empty random seed". 

Yes, that may indeed happen.  gpg does not take a file lock while
reading or writing the seed file; thus races may happen.  This is
usually not a severe problem as gpg will detect it and fill up the
entropy pool from /dev/random in this case.

The solution is to take a file lock; I don't want to do this always
but I see your problem and may be a new option can be used to lock
reandom-seed access.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner