> On Oct 30, 2001 11:07 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > Zero-padding isn't a problem, since it's perfectly safe to mix in zero
> > bytes into the pool.
>
> Well, Oliver tends to disagree. I don't know enough either way. It _does_
> seem bad that if you wrote continually wrote 1-byte values into /dev/random
> and padded out the end of the word that it would be bad. However, in the
> end this is no worse than cat /dev/zero > /dev/random, which is also allowed.
That was just conservatism on my part. There are a large number of hashes
and ciphers for which zero inputs are suboptimal so my gut feel was that
it was a bad idea. That was silly of me, given the way the mixing works.
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