Re: Putting a random translator into the Hurd directly?

[Michael Banck]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 04:23:05PM -0400, Michael Casadevall wrote:
> I've recently started hacking on Hurd again, and I'm curious why a  
> random translator isn't included by default in the Hurd. Looking at  
> the wiki, there are at least two different translators; we should  
> have one of these included out of the box because without /dev/(u) 
> random, its impossible to have SSH and a bunch of other programs.

the GNU maintainers (well, Marcus mostly I think) have made it clear
that a good solution to entropy needs to be found for the Hurd, no
half-baked low-security solution will be acceptable (you could argue
that the current state is much worse, but this is intentional I think -
people should *immediately realize* that there is no cryptographically
secure /dev/random provided by the Hurd and act accordingly.  Having a
/dev/random device would make them think everything is fine)

On the other hand, I think the Debian GNU/Hurd would benefit from a
halfway secure solution and it would be a good test-bed for inclusion
upstream.

So if you have something working, the debian-hurd@lists.debian.org
mailing list would be very interested.


Michael