Re: monitoring entropy

Ingo Molnar (mingo@pc7537.hil.siemens.at)
Wed, 15 Oct 1997 13:31:02 +0100 (MET)


On Tue, 14 Oct 1997, Colin Plumb wrote:

> It's just that there is a (very hard to compute)
> correlation between previously read data and subsequent results.

frequently, such 'unpredictibility proofs' is just based on _one_
measurement. But here we can basically 'sample' the pool virtually
_infinit times_. I cant prove it right now, but i _bet_ if i freeze the
entropy pool and read /dev/urandom, i will get constant/periodic output,
isnt it so?

'freezing' the pool, or polling it much faster than events get added to
the pool is the same thing ...

grrr! :)

-- mingo