From: shields@tembel.org (Michael Shields)
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 08:02:31 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: /dev/random for FreeBSD [was: Re: /dev/random for Linux]
In-Reply-To: <199510301925.VAA27116@grumble.grondar.za>
Message-ID: <473k3p$pt2@yage.tembel.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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In article <199510301925.VAA27116@grumble.grondar.za>,
Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za> wrote:
> Something I didn't mention earlier; we felt that letting the unwashed
> masses read /dev/*random was not a good idea, as they could deplete
> the pool of entropy all to easily for attack purposes.

That's really just a DOS attack, isn't it?  An application that needs
true randomness should be using /dev/random, which you can slow but not
disturb, and an application that is using /dev/urandom should be ok with
less than full entropy.

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-- 
Shields.