Question about random number generation

[Francis Litterio]

Johan Wevers wrote:

> Werner Koch wrote:
>
>> This is easy with DOS and maybe with Windows but hard for other OSes.
>> With DOS you have direct access to the interrupt service routine and
>> nothing is in the way.  Real operating systems abstract the key
>> presses from the application and there is no way to be sure that there
>> is not a course granularity when taking the timings.  So these event
>> might be quite predictable.
>
> Do you have any idea how this situation is under Linux? I generated an
> RSA key with pgp 2.6.3ia under Linux kernel 2.0.38, is this key secure?
> I remember there was also a difference in which RSA and ElGamal keys
> depend on a RNG (I remember also the RNG bug in pgp 5.0i for Unix).

On Linux, GnuPG can be configured via --enable-static-rnd=linux to use
/dev/random, the Linux entropy pool, or via --enable-static-rnd=egd to
use the Entropy Gathering Daemon (EGD).  I don't know which is the
default, but if you build from source, you have control over this.

If you use either of those configure options, then your key was
generated from reasonably good random numbers.
--
Francis Litterio
franl@world.std.com
http://world.std.com/~franl/
GPG and PGP public keys available on keyservers.