Ben Laurie writes: > What I am trying to do is extract whatever entropy there is in the > input. You appear to be saying that there's no point adding extra > entropy because it is estimated at zero. This makes no sense to me. What I am trying to say is that it doesn't matter if by some coincidence certain harvested file fragments contain zero. Furthermore, it doesn't matter if you feed /dev/random a whole bunch of zeros (except in the case where that swamps out other harvested events, and it is that problem we are trying to solve, amonmgst others). My proposed solution is intended so address, if not solve that problem, by preventing file writes from filling up the harvest queue. Yarrow already has pretty good data hashing; there is no point in duplicating that. Note that I have already agreed that external preconditioning of the data is a good idea; I like the idea of compression and some external hashing (but not the speed of these duting boot). Others may work, but ultimately I trust Yarrow more. M -- Mark R V Murray Cert APS(Open) Dip Phys(Open) BSc Open(Open) BSc(Hons)(Open) Pi: 132511160 _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-security To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"