Re: /dev/random on Linux

From: Johannes Berg
Date: Tue May 16 2006 - 11:08:48 EST


On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 16:58 +0200, Michael Buesch wrote:

> I think most (all?) of the machines, OpenWRT runs on, are running
> a bcm43xx wireless chip. This chip has a hardware random number
> generator. patches to utilize it recently went into -mm.
> But I must admit, we don't know how it generates random numbers.
> But someone did some RNG tests on it in the past (I think it was
> Johannes).

I did, but no predictability tests, only FIPS 140-2 or so. It checked
out pretty well but someone claimed that the RNG was predictable because
it was probably only used for some of the coding for wireless. I don't
know how to test this hypothesis as I don't know enough about QAM and
whatever codings are used there (nor do I know where you'd need
(pseudo-)random numbers)

johannes

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