GNU Savannah task #5130: random translator.

See the attached mbox.bz2 containing all the emails concerning this topic which I was able to gather from public archives. (!) This is not up-to-date anymore, as ?MichaelCasadevall is currently working on this.

Description

Sources of entropy are for example disk access latencies or keystroke patterns or behavior on networks. This suggests that for implementing a random translator a kernel part is needed as well, to gather that entropy. That kernel part would then export the gathered entropy via a kernel device, named perhaps entropy.

Setup Pseudo Random Devices

Stuck getting SSH to work? You need a pseudo random generator (PRG).

There are several solutions to the lack of /dev/random and /dev/urandom, but they are not yet in the default installation.


Setup Tips

Here are some tips on how to actually setup the two random devices using Kilobugs' random-64 server. His tarball is a complete Hurd server including a pre-built binary - so you don't need GCC or magic fingers for this! :)

After untaring the package you copy the random binary to the /hurd directory. Then you setup the translators for random and urandom.

# settrans -c /dev/random /hurd/random \
           --seed-file /var/run/random-seed --secure
# settrans -c /dev/urandom /hurd/random \
           --seed-file /var/run/urandom-seed --fast
# chmod 0644 /dev/random /dev/urandom