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

[Marc Haber]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 05:45:55PM -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> 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?

Ted suggested this to get some system-dependent information (for
example, the MAC address) into the entropy pool to avoid identical
systems to be seeded identically.

Greetings
Marc

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