From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: From: David Presotto To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] win32 rx server, 9pany ? In-Reply-To: <3F0B816D.8090107@nospam.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="upas-jmyssaqhyhynjjlymnaoxmzwjc" Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 23:30:46 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: efc8cf6c-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --upas-jmyssaqhyhynjjlymnaoxmzwjc Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Perhaps because it isn't a random number generator. Getting reasonable random numbers with beating clocks, ala /dev/random in plan9, is not hard. However, to have any confidence in it you really have to test it on every machine. I've got a few reasonable random number testers and there are plenty on the web. I throw them at our random generator every now and then to make sure nothing broke. If in Windows, a process can get interrupted by the 8253 clock, we can generate similarly random numbers there though perhaps at a slower rate. That does require that the 8253 stay independent of the cpu clock. However, something like the X9.17 algorithm, seeded by a small amount of random material will produce a ready supply of unpredicatble and incoherent bytes for things like prime number generation. You don't have to look around too much, we've already got it. --upas-jmyssaqhyhynjjlymnaoxmzwjc Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Disposition: inline Received: from plan9.cs.bell-labs.com ([135.104.9.2]) by plan9; Tue Jul 8 22:50:23 EDT 2003 Received: from mail.cse.psu.edu ([130.203.4.6]) by plan9; Tue Jul 8 22:50:20 EDT 2003 Received: by mail.cse.psu.edu (CSE Mail Server, from userid 60001) id 37DA419BAE; Tue, 8 Jul 2003 22:50:13 -0400 (EDT) Received: from psuvax1.cse.psu.edu (psuvax1.cse.psu.edu [130.203.6.6]) by mail.cse.psu.edu (CSE Mail Server) with ESMTP id 6160A19AF5; Tue, 8 Jul 2003 22:50:09 -0400 (EDT) X-Original-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Delivered-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Received: by mail.cse.psu.edu (CSE Mail Server, from userid 60001) id 831BE19BAE; Tue, 8 Jul 2003 22:49:01 -0400 (EDT) Received: from rwcrmhc11.comcast.net (rwcrmhc11.comcast.net [204.127.198.35]) by mail.cse.psu.edu (CSE Mail Server) with ESMTP id 7B36319AF5 for <9fans@cse.psu.edu>; Tue, 8 Jul 2003 22:48:58 -0400 (EDT) Received: from nospam.com (h00a0cca0b74a.ne.client2.attbi.com[24.34.51.37](untrusted sender)) by attbi.com (rwcrmhc11) with SMTP id <2003070902485301300ipiuie>; Wed, 9 Jul 2003 02:48:53 +0000 Message-ID: <3F0B816D.8090107@nospam.com> From: bs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020408 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] win32 rx server, 9pany ? References: <02dc01c345b1$3cc99e40$3f00a8c0@MERCURY> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: 9fans-admin@cse.psu.edu Errors-To: 9fans-admin@cse.psu.edu X-BeenThere: 9fans@cse.psu.edu X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk Reply-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu X-Reply-To: bs@cse.psu.edu List-Id: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans.cse.psu.edu> List-Archive: Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 22:43:57 -0400 X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-2.1 required=5.0 tests=EMAIL_ATTRIBUTION,QUOTED_EMAIL_TEXT,REFERENCES, REPLY_WITH_QUOTES,USER_AGENT_MOZILLA_UA,X_ACCEPT_LANG version=2.55 X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.55 (1.174.2.19-2003-05-19-exp) Andrew Simmons wrote: >>maybe if you told us the type of random numbers you need might help. > > > For session key generation etc. I've been looking at OpenSSL & Cryptlib, & > was just interested in any other alternatives. It would probably get too > far OT and boring to go into it further, so I'll shut up now. > Why not PRNGD? It has a liberal license. --upas-jmyssaqhyhynjjlymnaoxmzwjc--