Re:The strange story of “Extended Random”
by tptacek on Saturday December 23, 2017 @08:17PM
(#15997337)
No, what they're saying is that the notion that you can "drain" the system pool is an urban legend created by a bad Linux man page. In reality, entropy isn't really ever "drained" from the system entropy pool.
Re:The strange story of “Extended Random”
by AgalmicVentures on Saturday December 23, 2017 @08:30PM
(#15997382)
Expanding on this, for anyone who wants to read more, http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/ is a good resource.
Re:The strange story of “Extended Random”
by FeepingCreature on Sunday December 24, 2017 @12:32AM
(#15998142)
The pool's estimated isn't drained, but its "objective entropy" is reduced; ie. the amount of state leaked to the outside goes up. Of course, practically you can't recover that information within a usable timespan, so it's academic.
Actually, now I sort of wonder what would happen if you encrypted a quantum superposition so that to determine which branch was taken would require reversing an operation using, at the lower bound, more computation than is available in the universe. Would it hold, or collapse/decohere?
If you have a separate RNG per connection (or two per connection) that requires separate init, each connection would drain the system pool slightly. That’d be in constraint two having two static pools shared for all connections.