re source of random bits on a unix workstation in article pivot sbi com bet sbi com bennett todd salomon brothers inc ny writes i heard about this solution and it sounded good then i heard that folks were experiencing times of seconds to run this on reasonably configured workstations i m not willing to add that much delay to someone s login process my approach etherfind compress skip k takes a second or two to run i m considering writing the be all and end all of solutions that launches the md and simultaneously tries to suck bits off the net and if the net should be sitting so idle that it can t get k after compression before md finishes use the md this way i could have guaranteed good bits and a deterministic upper bound on login time and still have the common case of login take only a couple of extra seconds seconds to hash m of core i bet i know who the source of your information is no it s not acceptable if it s part of your login process but if you are going to use network traffic as the source of pseudo random information do the right thing and pass it through a cryptographic hash function not a compressor aside from the fact that it will run faster it will give better results think of a cryptographic hash as a function that distills randomness something along the lines of etherfind t x n dd bs k count dev null md should do the trick t gives you timestamps and the lack of u makes sure that dd does not get ten lines as opposed to ten k the above takes a couple of seconds on a lightly loaded ethernet bennett bet sbi com ji
