[OTR-dev] Faster key generation

Paul Wouters paul at cypherpunks.ca
Thu Jul 10 18:24:55 EDT 2008


On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, Ian Goldberg wrote:

> Thanks to Simon Josefsson!
> 
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=489523#37
> 
> If you want your IM client to use /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random to
> generate keys, stick this line just before the call to OTRL_INIT:
> 
>     gcry_control(GCRYCTL_ENABLE_QUICK_RANDOM, 0);
> 
> I've checked the change into pidgin-otr's cvs; the Debian/Ubuntu,
> Fedora, BSD, etc. package maintainers may wish to manually apply the
> patch until the next release:

What's the effect of security on using this? I tend to prefer /dev/random
for long term keys, and only use /dev/urandom for session keys.

Paul



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