Linux内核中的随机数算法

Linux内核源码linux/drivers/char/random.c开头的注释部分

 

/*
 * (now, with legal B.S. out of the way.....)
 *
 * This routine gathers environmental noise from device drivers, etc.,
 * and returns good random numbers, suitable for cryptographic use.
 * Besides the obvious cryptographic uses, these numbers are also good
 * for seeding TCP sequence numbers, and other places where it is
 * desirable to have numbers which are not only random, but hard to
 * predict by an attacker.
 *
 * Theory of operation
 * ===================
 *
 * Computers are very predictable devices.  Hence it is extremely hard
 * to produce truly random numbers on a computer --- as opposed to
 * pseudo-random numbers, which can easily generated by using a
 * algorithm.  Unfortunately, it is very easy for attackers to guess
 * the sequence of pseudo-random number generators, and for some
 * applications this is not acceptable.  So instead, we must try to
 * gather "environmental noise" from the computer's environment, which
 * must be hard for outside attackers to observe, and use that to
 * generate random numbers.  In a Unix environment, this is best done
 * from inside the kernel.
 *
 * Sources of randomness from the environment include inter-keyboard
 * timings, inter-interrupt timings from some interrupts, and other
 * events which are both (a) non-deterministic and (b) hard for an
 * outside observer to measure.  Randomness from these sources are
 * added to an "entropy pool", which is mixed using a CRC-like function.
 * This is not cryptographically strong, but it is adequate assuming
 * the randomness is not chosen maliciously, and it is fast enough that
 * the overhead of doing it on every interrupt is very reasonable.
 * As random bytes are mixed into the entropy pool, the routines keep
 * an *estimate* of how many bits of randomness have been stored into
 * the random number generator's intern