win32 random source

[David Shaw]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 02:00:55PM -0400, Mullins, Steven B. wrote:
> Can anyone tell me what the win32 compiled binary uses as a entropy source?

The win32 code uses a random gatherer based on Peter Gutmann's
Cryptlib.  The source for it is in cipher/rndw32.c in the GnuPG
distribution.

The specific items used to stir into the random pool are things like
the disk I/O metrics, network statistics, some system performance
metrics, process statistics, etc.

GnuPG has a notion of entropy quality, and it ranks the entropy
sources accordingly.

David