[Pkg-gnutls-maint] Bug#475168: certtool --generate-dh-params is ridiculously wasteful of entropy

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2008-04-09 sacrificial-spam-address at horizon.com wrote:
> Package: gnutls-bin
> Version: 2.2.2-1

> "/usr/bin/certtool --generate-dh-params --bits 384" performs 25
> 120-byte reads (3000 bytes, or 24 kbits total) from /dev/urandom,
> even though its output is only 384 bits, and doesn't even need to
> be cryptographically secure in the first place.

> I have gotten lost trying to figure out where the waste is actually
> ocurring, so the problem may be in libgcrypt11-1.4.0

Which version of libgcrypt11 do you have installed? There has been a
change in the latest upload in January:

libgcrypt11 (1.4.0-3) unstable; urgency=low

  * Added debian/patches/13_fixexcessiverandom.diff: Patch by upstream fixing
    reducing /dev/*random usage for initialising the RNG to less than 1/100.
    This bug was introduced in 1.3.1.

cu andreas

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