New entropy source proposal.

From: Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd_at_FreeBSD.org)
Date: 03/07/05

  • Next message: Poul-Henning Kamp: "Re: New entropy source proposal." 
    Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 14:03:30 +0100
To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org

    Hi.

    I've been playing a bit with "use sound card as an entropy source" idea.
    This simple program does what I wanted:

            http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/sndrand.tbz

    The program is very simple, it should be run with two arguments:

            % sndtest /dev/dspW 1048576 > rand.data

    This command will generate 1MB of random data.

    With my sound card:

    pcm0: <Intel ICH3 (82801CA)> port 0xe100-0xe13f,0xe000-0xe0ff irq 11 at device 31.5 on pci0
    pcm0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
    pcm0: <Cirrus Logic CS4299 AC97 Codec>

    It produce very good entropy. I tried those tests to prove its quality:
    - FIPS 140-2 tests
    - 'ent' tests: http://www.fourmilab.ch/random/
    - Famous 'diehard' tests

    The full output from diehard tests is here:

            http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/sndrand_diehard.txt

    The idea of using sound card as entropy source was taken from RFC 1750.

    If people like the idea and someone more skilled than me in this subject
    can review this stuff, we can start to put it into kernel
    "random infrastructure". It could also be implemented as userland daemon
    which writes collected entropy to /dev/random maybe... 

    -- 
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheel.pl
pjd@FreeBSD.org                           http://www.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD committer                         Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!

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