Subject: Re: NFS and reserved ports
To: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@dsg.stanford.edu>
From: Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>
List: tech-security
Date: 03/24/1997 12:06:43
Jonathan Stone writes:
> 
> >It was looked at, and as you can see, fsirand(8) is already in the tree.
> >I believe the completion of this is currently stalled on a good /dev/random
> >implementation.
> 
> Uh, but ... how are you going to get high-bandwidth randomness to do
> anything useful and `strongly random' with an entire partition worth
> of inodes -- 9 Gigabytes or more, for some installations?  

You use a cryptographic quality pseudorandom number generator (yes,
these exist -- see RC4 as an example) and you seed it from a true RNG
like a /dev/random

> Historically, didn't the original SunOS implementation get by without
> high-quality randomness?  How good was that?

It sucked moose weenie.

Perry