GPG with GPUs

[Robert J. Hansen]

On 06/16/2012 01:54 PM, Hauke Laging wrote:
> Are these files huge? It's hard for me to believe that this takes
> seconds. What I would easily believe is that the system gets an
> entropy problem... So maybe a hardware RNG improves your situation.

Be careful about saying this without learning what OS and hardware the
other fellow is running on.

On Windows, for instance, RNGs are provided by ADVAPI32!RtlGenRandom.
(For those who think it should of course be ADVAPI32!CryptGenRandom,
well, rest easy, ADVAPI32!CryptGenRandom calls ADVAPI32!RtlGenRandom to
do its heavy lifting.)  This is, per MSDN, a PRNG.  He's not hitting an
entropy problem with that.

On Linux, the default implementation uses /dev/random, which may
potentially run into an entropy problem, and your advice to invest in a
hardware RNG might make sense... unless he's running on an Ivy Bridge or
later, in which case it already has a hardware RNG built in.