Hello to the list, I'm working on a cryptography project, and one of the things the project requires is a moderately high-bandwidth source of truly random numbers. To accomplish this, I set up OpenBSD on a board with a (Soekris) Hifn 7955 accelerator card, but the rate I'm getting by reading out of /dev/srandom is pretty low (200B/s). However, this has to be coming from the card, because the machine has no other reasonable source of entropy other than the network: no hard drive, no keyboard, etc.
Now, unless the card's specs are deceptive, its random number generator must support a higher rate than this: it claims 70 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchanges per second, and each such key exchange requires a full 1024-bit random number, which comes out to 8.8kB/s. The minimum data rate for my application is about 1k/s, and I would strongly prefer not to use a PRNG. Is there a more direct way to query the RNG? random(4) claims that the RNG is not mapped directly to a device (/dev/random is not currently implemented), but rather that it periodically refreshes the system entropy pool. Is there a way to force this to occur more often, or to transfer more data? Or do the numbers lie, and I'm getting all the data I can? Thanks for your time, Mike Hamburg P.S. I'm looking at different sources of random numbers, and cost and integration are important factors. Would an AMD Geode LX or VIA C3 or C7 processor's on-board RNG provide a significantly higher data rate than a Soekris card, at a comparable quality?
