[openssl-project] Entropy seeding the DRBG

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Sat, Apr 07, 2018 at 04:58:06PM +0200, Richard Levitte wrote:
> > Can I suggest you try something like
> > https://github.com/usnistgov/SP800-90B_EntropyAssessment to at least
> > get an idea? You would need to sample 1 variable and feed that into
> > it.
> 
> And yeah, sure, especially if all it takes is to produce a stream of
> bits from a source and feed that to the assessment program.  As long
> as I don't have to port a C++11 program to VMS, 'cause unfortunately,
> the existing C++ compiler hasn't had a real update for quite a while
> :-/ (I'm sure that VSI is quite busy updating all they can, but they
> haven't let anything out yet)

You only need to generate the bits on VMS, you can run the tool on
some other machine.

If you have such a program that collects the bits, I would like to
review it. I would also like to test something like that over a
range of machines it's expected to run on.

I wonder if it's useful to have a thread of VMS that collects such
bits all the time, like the kernel is doing.

I'm going to guess that the 4 bit you count now is an overestimate.
And I would like to be very conservative in estimating something
like that, and even divide what the tool returns by 10.


Kurt