Ok, so I want to begin programming an entropy pool generator for linux. I’ve been reading up on sources of entropy generation, but its seems like most powerful entropy sources come from reading hardware. Would I even have access to the sources I need, or does the operating system prevent me from doing that? Also, if I could, how would I begin to communicate with these devices. I’m going to try to find out more, but if anyone could even point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.
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Check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/gkernel/files/rng-tools/ to see how to add a hardware generator.
The modules for accessing the hw_random stuff can be loaded at any time using insmod.
Another option is to write random data to a character device node and use rngd to make that an entropy source. easy as pie:
You can create and directly access device nodes as admin.
The only problem here is actually getting some random stuff into your random node thing…if you aren’t using on-board hardware then that’s a whole other story.
Hope this helped