[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#455230: Bug#455230: /etc/init.d/urandom: please consider doign dmesg > /dev/random at startup

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Sun, 09 Dec 2007, Marc Haber wrote:
> during a discussion on the LKML, it was suggested to do "dmesg >
> /dev/random" in the startups scrips of a distribution.  Please
> consider doing this in Debian.

Debian already seeds /dev/random with data from the last shutdown.  And
there is little entropy in dmesg.  Maybe we could do dmesg | gzip, to
increase the entropy per bit of data a lot, but it still doesn't help much:
since the output of dmesg doesn't change much from one boot to the next
one, that could open an avenue of attack on the initial state of the PRNG.

Exactly why do you want to do this?

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh