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1995-09-25 - Re: Netscape “random” number seed generator code available

Header Data

From: Jon Mittelhauser <jonm@netscape.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: e313e7d30ded7b0f73fb9421d84edfecfaa24fb92a4ae0127200eb4c2e77b5d7
Message ID: <446rp8$14h@tera.mcom.com>
Reply To: <445j6k$h03@tera.mcom.com>
UTC Datetime: 1995-09-25 18:19:15 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 25 Sep 95 11:19:15 PDT

Raw message

From: Jon Mittelhauser <jonm@netscape.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 95 11:19:15 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Netscape "random" number seed generator code available
In-Reply-To: <445j6k$h03@tera.mcom.com>
Message-ID: <446rp8$14h@tera.mcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


adam@lighthouse.homeport.org (Adam Shostack) wrote:
>Jeff Weinstein wrote:
>| 
>|   More on the RNG stuff.  On Unix systems we look for ~/.pgp/randseed.bin,
>| and feed it through the RNG hash.  On Unix and PC systems we feed the
>| environment through the hash, so that would be a good place for a
>| concerned user to put some random stuff of their own.
>
>On a SunOS (or any BSD) box ps -e will get you environment variables.
>
>ps -eaxuw
>USER       PID %CPU %MEM   SZ  RSS TT STAT START  TIME COMMAND
>root        53  0.0  0.0   68    0 ?  IW   Sep 19  0:02 portmap HOME=/
>PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/etc:/usr/ucb
>root        68  0.0  0.0   16    0 ?  I    Sep 19  0:00  (biod)
>root        58  0.0  0.0   40    0 ?  IW   Sep 19  0:00 keyserv HOME=/
>PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/etc:/usr/ucb

If you take a look at the code you will see that this (and a ton of
other things) are already being done...Jeff is only pointing out
an extra item which is of special interest to the people in this
group...we are no longer relying on any single item of data but
rather a very large set and constant re-seeding during idle loops...

-Jon

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