>>>>> "co" == Christian Otrel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
co> Im stuck on this one. Please help me. Random number generator not
co> seeded!!! ok 11 www.cdw.com (Microsoft-IIS/5.0) Random number generator
co> not seeded!!! SSL_write 255: 1 - error:140790E5:SSL
co> routines:SSL23_WRITE:ssl handshake failure ok 12 www.rsa.com () Random
co> number generator not seeded!!!
The algorithms need randomness. You might see if you have a random device on
the computer (maybe /dev/random). Mine don't. Alternatively, you can get egd
(entropy gathering daemon). README file below:
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Hash: SHA1
EGD : an Entropy Gathering Daemon
v0.8
Brian Warner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<http://www.lothar.com/tech/crypto/>
originally intended for use with the GNU Privacy Guard
<http://www.gnupg.org>
This is a standalone daemon that sits around running various statistics
collection programs (ps, vmstat, iostat, etc). It hashes the results into an
"entropy pool". If things happen on your system at relatively random and
unpredictable times, then some of that randomness will become a part of the
entropy pool and can be used to generate random numbers. It is basically a
user-space implementation of the Linux kernel /dev/random device. As such, it
should be runnable on all unix-like systems. It is intended to make up for the
lack of /dev/random on non-Linux systems so that programs like GPG can be used
safely.
This daemon should be allowed to run for a long time. It only gathers a small
amount of entropy at a time, because many system statistics do not change
very frequently and are rather predictable if sampled too quickly. It does not
require any special privileges to run, but it may be reasonable for a sysadmin
to arrange for it to be started at boot time, allowing it to be used by all
users.
The daemon provides a socket interface (either UNIX-style or TCP) from which
the entropy can be read. For the exact protocol, see the notes at the end of
the daemon source. Blocking and non-blocking reads are available, as well as a
call to get the amount of entropy available in the pool. The entropy level is
raised by running gatherer programs (which happens automatically over time)
and adding their output; it is lowered by clients reading entropy. Once the
count goes to zero, no entropy can be read until some more is generated. There
is currently no equivalent to the Linux /dev/urandom device, which provides
exactly this read-when-entropy-is-empty capability (at this point the data
returned is no longer truly random, merely cryptographically strong).
The daemon is written in perl for greatest portability to lots of non-Linux
systems. perl5.004 should be plenty. It uses the SHA extension, currently by
Uwe Hollerbach, available from CPAN. If your system does not already have this
extension installed, version 1.2 will be installed for you (to make it easier
to embed this module in the GnuPG distribution). This embedded version has
been modified slightly to not ask the user about doing SHA-0 versus SHA-1 at
configure time (to allow the GnuPG configure process to remain
non-interactive). The list of entropy gathering programs includes a variety of
stats programs. They are searched for in a number of common directories. Any
that are missing are pruned from the list at startup; any that cause runtime
errors are dropped as well. Most sources remove all but the digits from the
output in an attempt to distill the entropy before counting how many bits are
provided by that source.
HOW TO INSTALL:
Installation isn't strictly necessary. If you already have the SHA module
installed, then the egd.pl script can be run directly from any location.
Using the installation process just puts it into a common place. You install
EGD just as you would any normal perl module:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
(there are no self-tests, so don't worry if the "make test" step complains
about errors). The 'make install' step must generally be executed as root.
The Makefile.PL will check to see if you have SHA installed already, and will
build/install an included copy if not. After installation, egd.pl will
probably be found in /usr/bin/egd.pl or /usr/local/bin/egd.pl, and should
already be on your $PATH. The example scripts in eg/ are useful for testing,
and for calculating how much entropy your system can generate (bits per
second), but are not installed.
HOW TO USE EGD WITH GPG: <http://www.gnupg.org>
First, you'll need to configure GnuPG to use EGD for it's random number needs.
If you are compiling GPG, the easiest way to do this is at configure time.
Add "--enable-static-rnd=egd" to the arguments you give to ./configure . If
you have a pre-compiled version of GPG that wasn't configured this way, you
should be able to use a loadable extension module to accomplish the same
thing; try adding:
load-extension rndegd
to your ~/.gnupg/options file, or use "--load-extension=rndegd" on the
command line when you run GPG. Since a system that doesn't have /dev/random
at compile time probably won't have it at runtime, configuring rndegd
statically makes a lot more sense.
Second, you need to have the daemon running. EGD listens on unix-domain
socket for entropy requests. Unless you modify the path name in the GnuPG
file "cipher/rndegd.c", GPG will look for this socket in your home directory,
in ~/.gnupg/entropy (specifically it will look for "entropy" in the same
directory that has your keyrings, the "--homedir"). So you need to tell EGD
to listen there. Simply start the daemon as follows:
egd.pl ~/.gnupg/entropy
If you've never run GPG before, you'll have to create your ~/.gnupg directory
yourself (gpg will make it for you the first time it's run). The daemon
automatically forks itself into the background. Wait a few minutes for it to
collect some entropy. After that, GPG should run just like usual. If you
encrypt or sign stuff too frequently, you may get messages telling you to
wait as more entropy is gathered. Just give the daemon a few minutes to
gather more entropy, and GPG will continue along.
HOW TO USE EGD FOR THE GPG SELF-TESTS:
The 'make check' target in GPG performs some extensive self-tests. I highly
recommend running them after you compile a new version, especially on the
less-common systems (anything other than linux-i386). The only problem is
that the self tests require an enormous amount of entropy, 58320 bytes as of
gnupg-0.9.9 . EGD cannot gather entropy very fast (50 *bits* per second in my
tests on a solaris box), so using EGD the normal way can result in self tests
that take several hours to run.
The simple workaround is the --bottomless option to EGD. That tells the
daemon to serve up an infinite pool of entropy instead of making the
requestor wait until more can be collected. Naturally you don't want to use
this mode for normal encryption: it would be considerably less secure. But
it's handy for tests. If you use it this way, I recommend also using the
--quit-after=60 option, which tells the daemon to quit after 60 minutes. That
way you won't have an insecure --bottomless EGD lying around forever,
possibly encouraging unsuspecting users to use it.
In addition, the self-tests run with GPG's --homedir option pointed at the
source tree's checks/ directory (since they use special test keys and not
your personal keyrings). That means they expect the entropy socket to live
there too. Either make a symlink to your ~/.gnupg/entropy socket, or start
the daemon listening to checks/entropy. (you can have multiple daemons
running: your normal, real one on ~/.gnupg/entropy, and the test-only,
--bottomless one in checks/entropy).
So to run the self tests:
cd gnupg-1.0.1
egd.pl --bottomless --quit-after=60 checks/entropy
(wait a minute or two to let the entropy build up)
make check
HOW TO USE EGD WITH OpenSSH: <http://www.openssh.com>
(thanks to Patrick Gardella)
First, you'll need to configure OpenSSH to use EGD for it's random number
needs. Add "--with-egd-pool=/etc/entropy" to the arguments you give to
./configure.
Second, you need to have the daemon running. EGD listens on unix-domain
socket for entropy requests. When you start egd.pl, you tell it where to
create the socket. It can be anywhere for which you have write
permissions. Common places include, /etc/entropy, /tmp/entropy, etc.
Simply start the daemon as follows:
egd.pl /etc/entropy
The daemon automatically forks itself into the background. Wait a few
minutes for it to collect some entropy before you try to run a command
like make host-key or ssh-keygen. After that, OpenSSH should run
just like usual. You may get messages telling you to wait as more
entropy is gathered. Just give the daemon a few minutes to gather
more entropy, and OpenSSH will continue along.
HOW TO USE EGD WITH OpenSSL: <http://www.openssh.org>
(I've never done this myself, feel free to send me better instructions)
Look at the man page for RAND_egd(3), available online in
<http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/RAND_egd.html>. You should start EGD
ahead of time, pointing it to a socket like /etc/entropy. You then provide
the path to that socket in the RAND_egd() call.
Based solely upon a cursory read of the man page, it appears that OpenSSL
creates a new single-use connection to the socket for every call to
RAND_egd() (presumably once per program), and tries to get as much entropy as
it can (the call has no parameter for how many bytes to read). If that is
true, then several calls to RAND_egd() within a short time (say, sequential
invocations of a program that uses SSL) will exhaust the entropy pool.
RAND_egd() uses a non-blocking read, so the application will get an error
about insuffient entropy rather than sleeping until EGD gathers more. After a
short time (seconds to minutes depending upon the number of working gathering
programs available) the pool will refill and RAND_egd() will begin to succeed
again.
HOW TO USE EGD WITH OTHER PROGRAMS:
EGD can't completely simulate the convenient /dev/random device. It is not
possible to simply replace /dev/random with ~/.gnupg/entropy . The UNIX
socket created by EGD runs a simple protocol, described in the egd.pl source
with a sample implementation in eg/egc.pl . You will need to modify your
program to speak this protocol to the socket when it needs entropy. The
cipher/rndegd.c code in GnuPG is also a useful starting point.
LICENSE:
EGD is free software and can be used and copied under the terms of the GNU
General Public License. Please see the file COPYING in this directory for
the exact terms. Share and Enjoy!
(please note that the included SHA-1.2 module comes under a slightly
different license, the same as used by Perl itself, which is a bit more
liberal than the GPL. I chose to put EGD under GPL because the cryptlib
library that inspired it was permitted to be distributed in GPG under the GPL
and I figured I should do the same. If you find this restrictive, please
write me, and I'd be happy to give you permission to do other stuff with it).
BUGS and LIMITATIONS:
EGD forks itself into the background automatically. It probably doesn't do
this as cleanly as it ought to (by following the helpful hints in the perl
documentation). So there might be ways to make it die by removing the
environment it was started under (unmounting the filesystem, stuff like
that).
The stirring of the pool feels secure to me, and uses SHA which is widely
considered secure, but there could be some weird interaction that causes
the entropy to be less random than you would expect. Some rough tests have
been done, but nothing really extensive. Please consider the output to be
fairly unpredictable but not necessarily completely random: use the output
to seed a random number generation algorithm. This is what GPG does with it.
Because this program may be asked to touch the filesystem in a place that is
world-readable (the entropy socket in a shared directory; if EGD is started
by the administrator and used by all users), the usual concerns about symlink
attacks hold. It may be best to put the socket in a directory that is not
world-writable, e.g. /etc/entropy instead of /tmp/entropy.
EGD is written in Perl because I felt that it was the best way to make it run
on the target machines (unix-like systems without /dev/random or equivalent).
It would probably be easier to follow if it were in C using glib, because I
could use their event loop, gIOchannels, and timers, rather than building my
own. (and the one I built is really ugly). But Perl runs on more weird
systems than glib, and more people are trying to port Perl to those systems
than glib. If it needs to be seriously extended, though, rewriting it should
be seriously considered.
And remember that this is a userspace solution to a problem that is better
handled in kernel space. The kernel sees a lot more random events (interrupt
timestamps, network packet arrivals, keystrokes) than userspace can ever hope
to see. Linux and some of the *BSD systems have /dev/random to provide this
facility. For newer Solaris releases, there is a kernel module developed by
Andreas Maier at <http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~andi/> which /dev/random. EGD is
only useful on unix-like systems which do not already provide a strong source
of entropy.
AUTHOR:
Brian Warner, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Please send all patches, bug reports,
and comments to me. I'm especially interested in how well it works on
systems I don't have access to (I've only got linux, sunos, and solaris to
test on), as well as new gatherer programs to add to the list.
EGD was inspired by, and got the initial list of random number sources
from, the cryptlib entropy gathering code, by Peter Gutmann and others.
<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/cryptlib/index.html>
Thanks to Werner Koch for writing GnuPG and for convincing me to go and
write this thing.
Visit <http://www.lothar.com/tech/crypto/> for updates and other fun stuff.
Changes in the most recent release: (see ChangeLog for older entries)
v0.8 :
* egd.pl: change select() handling to check "readable" before
"errorful". Newer Solaris kernels (and maybe irix) sometimes
report EOF as both. The symptom was that all sources were marked
unusable, since they looked like errors, and the daemon would
eventually run out of sources and hang.
* egd.pl: Fixed source-shutdown code to never shutdown a source
twice.
* egd.pl: Added check to abort if all gatherers get marked
unusable. Note that this isn't necessarily right, if you want to
use EGD purely as an entropy repository (no gatherers at all, the
entropy comes from clients who write it in) then you'll need to
remove this check.
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