entropy

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 06:40:02PM +0100, Roberto Ragusa wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >  if I simply write to /dev/random, will that increase the entropy of my
> > system? (I'm assuming that the data I'm writing are random and that
> > somehow I got them).
> Wikipedia says so.
> My tests say no.

How are you testing?

The wikipedia article says:

  Non-random data is harmless, because only a privileged user can issue the
  ioctl  needed to increase the entropy estimate. 

SO 

-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect 
Cyberinfrastructure Labs / Instructional & Research Computing
Computing & Information Technology 
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences