Subject: Re: [Govpn-devel] goVPN PRNG

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 3 May 2015 23:01:23 +0300

Greetings, Andreas!

*** Andreas Briese <[email-masked]> [2015-05-03 19:09]:
>maybe you have a look at the PRNG breeze under https://github.com/AndreasBriese/breeze as an alternative to FORTUNA. I tested breeze heavily under macOSX and i don’t see, why it should work less reliable with other systems.

It seems very interesting, but my first impression is that it heavily
depends on particular floating point implementation, on hardware and
because of that has various strength on different CPUs and
architectures. I very like its idea as an additional entropy source!
However in my opinion it should be mixed with another ones too. So layer
like either Yarrow or Fortuna are necessary to use and mix several
entropy sources.

Currently my decision is to rely on operating system's PRNG. FreeBSD
uses Yarrow for a long time, Linux has patches to include Fortuna as a
/dev/random backend. The main question is how reliable are entropy
sources. And neither own libraries and implementation, nor OS ones can
not guarantee that they will be high quality enough, especially in
closed source systems.

But I will think about all that issues more. Thank you for pointing to
chaos based PRNGs!

-- 
Happy hacking, Sergey Matveev