[OTR-users] Pidgin freezes on OTR private key generation

Michael McConville mmcconville at mykolab.com
Mon Sep 14 15:02:07 EDT 2015


Lachezar Dobrev wrote:
> You may not have enough entropy! Try downloading something big, or
> watch a film off your hard drive. Move your mouse, type on the
> keyboard.
> 
> That said… I do think this operation should be asynchronous, and not
> hang the UI.

True. I think Tomasz may actually already have a patch in his branch for
this.

That said, the other option is to change the gcrypt randomness quality
level (of type gcry_random_level_t) from GCRY_VERY_STRONG_RANDOM to
GCRY_STRONG_RANDOM. These represent /dev/random and /dev/urandom
respectively.

I think the only concern is that Linux doesn't block /dev/urandom until
it has sufficient entropy. However, (IIUC) this is mostly only a problem
in early boot stages and on embedded devices, which don't apply to most
OTR use cases. OTR already uses /dev/urandom for ephemeral keys.


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