Subject: Re: NFS file handles are guessable.
To: Marc Horowitz <marc@cygnus.com>
From: Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>
List: tech-security
Date: 03/07/1997 17:16:05
Marc Horowitz writes:
> "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:
> >> The general mechanism one uses these days is note the low bits on a
> >> high resolution timer when you get in certain kinds of interrupts
> >> (like keyboard interrupts) and to then mix and distil the bits with
> >> SHA.
> 
> At Crypto '94, Don Davis et al described a technique for generating
> random numbers by sampling disk access times.

Marc;

I've heard several people question Davis's statistics from that
paper. However, regardless, the infrastructure I described before for
/dev/random can be applied to sample disk timings as well.

Perry