[Cryptech Tech] trng ready for play

[Joachim Strömbergson]

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Aloha!

Randy Bush wrote:
>>> if entropy providers vary much in speed, having a per-provider 
>>> timeout may be wise.
>> True. The provider might even be made to handle the timeout itself.
>> The avalanche entropy provider for example will know the 
>> approximate internal data rate anyway so having it adjusting the 
>> timeout. OTOH this would still push the ability to break out from 
>> livelock away from the collector.
> 
> and that's the rub.  i prefer simha's approach of A watching B (and, 
> where appropriate, vice versa).


What we could do is:

(1) Have fairly sane timeout defaults (we need reset values anyway) in
the mixer and allow SW to change timeouts by writing new reg values.
This is possible today, but have one single timeout for all entropy
providers.

(2) Have the entropy providers provide an estimate of their current rate
as a readable value to SW. The avalanche noise have this ability today
and it should be possible to do in other entropry providers and wouldn't
be a very hard requirement.

Then it will be able for SW to do the intelligent control by reading the
current rate in a given entropy provider and adjusting the corresponding
timeout value in the mixer. If nothing is done, the sane defaults are
still used.

I'm planning to start adding security alarms and one of the first is
ability for the mixer to signal that timeout has been reached for a
given mixer.


>> We should make a list of features to add somewhere. For me the
>> highest priorities right now are:

I have started to think that we really should start using the issue
tracker we have in the trac-wiki. That would allow more people to see
what we do and also provide comments, ideas etc. And then we can also
provide tracking in the rev logs (Trac supports this automatically).

The functionality above would be typical things to add ass feature tickets.

- -- 
Med vänlig hälsning, Yours

Joachim Strömbergson - Alltid i harmonisk svängning.
========================================================================
 Joachim Strömbergson          Secworks AB          joachim at secworks.se
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