How to get GnuPG and EGD to work together under Cygwin?

Francis Litterio franl@world.std.com
Wed Sep 25 11:22:00 GMT 2002


Volker Quetschke <quetschke@scytek.de> writes:

> > Has anyone managed to get GnuPG and EGD (the Entropy Gathering Daemon --
> > http://egd.sourceforge.net/) to work together under Cygwin?

> never tried ;-) but it should be possible. Did you read the annoncement
> concerning gnupg 1.0.7-3?
>
> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-08/msg01059.html
>
> The relevant part is:
>
> * Fixed the use of loadable modules. Now all modules can be loaded with the
>     --load-extension=<modulename> command. The standard build will link
>     rndlinux statically, but if you run
>     $ ./configure --enable-static-rnd=none
>     then also the rndegd random generator modules will be build as a loadable
>     module. Attention! Now you have to call gpg with --load-extension=rnd???
>     to make it work properly.
>
> Actually, I never tried, but it may work. Please let me know if it does.

I got it to work.  I downloaded the GnuPG source code from the Cygwin
Web site, configured with

	--enable-static-rnd=egd --disable-dev-random

and now it works fine with EGD.  I had to alter EGD to gather data using
commands appropriate for Windows rather than UNIX (e.g., "ps -W" instead
of "vmstat", "netstat -a -n -p tcp" instead of "netstat -ant").  One fun
way to get good entropy is to use this gathering command:

   wget -O - http://www.earthwatch.com/SKYWATCH/images/IRUS2D.jpg

It fetches a periodically-updated ~50 KB JPEG weather satellite image of
North America.  The opportunities for gathering entropy from Webcams are
abundant, and the weather is nicely chaotic!  Talk about the "butterfly
effect" on the weather!  Now a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan can
affect GnuPG key generation around the world.
--
Francis Litterio
franl@world.std.com
http://world.std.com/~franl/
GPG and PGP public keys available on keyservers.


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