freenet.crypt

Interface PersistentRandomSource

All Known Implementing Classes:

Yarrow

public interface PersistentRandomSource

A RandomSource which supports writing a seed to disk, and bootstrapping future instances of it by reading the seed file from disk.
If the random number generator used by the node implements this interface, the node is obliged to call write_seed(boolean) during shutdown to store the seed to disk.

This is a benefit in security as entropy can be preserved across restarts of Freenet, to cope with systems which offer low entropy on the system random number generator such as /dev/random.

TODO: Code quality: Please move read_seed() from Yarrow to this as well.

Method Summary

Modifier and Type	Method and Description
void	write_seed(boolean force) Explanation of the purpose of this mechanism is at its interface PersistentRandomSource.

Method Detail

write_seed

void write_seed(boolean force)

Explanation of the purpose of this mechanism is at its interface PersistentRandomSource.

Parameters:

force - If false, the implementation might decide to ignore this function call if the seed file was written to disk a short time ago already.