On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

It's sensible to consider possible attacks against the entropy source, but it's also dependant on the threat model you choose - for most people, radio signal-jamming by men in black suits is probably not on their threat radar :-)

Really, the question to ask is "can this source be used to gather bits which are not under the control of an attacker with modest resources, or visible to him?" The answer for most things is "yes, to some extent" at which point further speculation becomes useless until someone actually implements the measurement hooks and tests them for quality. For example, the "safest" use for the radio receiver may be from the intrinsic sampling noise.

Which hooks should be used on a system and what weight they should be given is a matter for local policy and customization and should be exposed to the administrator (with "reasonable" system defaults).

Actually mainstream physics says this is not even possible, so you can rest easy on that front :-)

I havent seen anyone attacking Mark for what he has done. He was attacked for his methods in introducing it to FreeBSD, and there are implementation and algorithmic details yet to be resolved to everyone's satisfcation, but I think everyone agrees that it's a fundamentally good and useful thing.

To paraphrase a saying: when the only discussion metaphor you have is a bikeshed, all the world looks green :-)

Kris

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