[OTR-users] Private key generation hangs indefinitely on Ubuntu 13.10

[Chris Ballinger]

While trying to reproduce a reported
issue<https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS/issues/128>with
ChatSecure's OTR negotiation with Pidgin I discovered an apparently
long standing key generation bug preventing the use of pidgin-otr on Ubuntu.

Steps to reproduce:

1) Install Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit in VMware Fusion 5.0.3 w/ VMware Tools for
Linux on Mac OS 10.9 (Mavericks)
2) Install Pidgin 2.10.7 and pidgin-otr 4.0.0 through Ubuntu Software Center
3) Attempt to generate a private key for any account

It looks like this is a long standing bug in Debian/Ubuntu that may be
related to libgcrypt's key generation routines getting blocked on reads
from /dev/random or /dev/urandom.

Here are a collection of issues I found documenting this bug:

1) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pidgin-otr/+bug/303862
2) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pidgin-otr/+bug/303866
3) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pidgin-otr/+bug/240640
4) http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=489523 (it looks like
there is a lengthy discussion from 2008 there where Ian discusses
asynchronous key generation)
5) http://sourceforge.net/p/otr/bugs/22/
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