Seth David Schoen <schoenat_private> said: [...] > An intermediate possibility is to have multiple RNGs with multiple sources > of entropy, or multiple RNGs with entropy divided among them somehow, or > a single RNG which enforces a reasonable policy of some sort when multiple > processes want to access it at once. Linux has /dev/random (real random) and /dev/urandom (generated with help of a RNG if not enough entropy in /dev/random). Just shut off people from using /dev/random. > Modern multiuser operating systems have solved all _kinds_ of problems around > concurrency and dealing with contention over a shared resource. There is > no reason that they should not be able to do exactly the same thing for an > entropy pool, if it becomes an issue. The problem here is not a shared resource, it is a finite resource. And solutions there (f.ex. disk space) are quotas or manual intervention. Sou you'd have a /etc/random.quotas file saying which UID is allowed to use how much entropy, and the kernel keeps track from there after being primed on boot. Yuck. -- Horst von Brand vonbrandat_private Casilla 9G, Viņa del Mar, Chile +56 32 672616
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 15:34:06 PDT