SSH-RAND-HELPER(8)UNIX System V (April 14, 2002SSH-RAND-HELPER(8)
NAME
ssh-rand-helper - Random number gatherer for OpenSSH
SYNOPSIS
ssh-rand-hlper [-vxXh] [-b bytes]
DESCRIPTION
ssh-rand-helper is a small helper program used by ssh(1),
ssh-add(1), ssh-agent(1), ssh-keygen(1), ssh-keyscan(1) and
sshd(8) to gather random numbers of cryptographic quality if
the openssl(4) library has not been configured to provide
them itself.
Normally ssh-rand-helper will generate a strong random seed
and provide it to the calling program via standard output.
If standard output is a tty, ssh-rand-helper will instead
print the seed in hexidecimal format unless told otherwise.
ssh-rand-helper will by default gather random numbers from
the system commands listed in /etc/openssh/ssh_prng_cmds.
The output of each of the commands listed will be hashed and
used to generate a random seed for the calling program.
ssh-rand-helper will also store seed files in
~/.ssh/prng_seed between executions.
Alternately, ssh-rand-helper may be configured at build time
to collect random numbers from a EGD/PRNGd server via a unix
domain or localhost tcp socket.
This program is not intended to be run by the end-user, so
the few commandline options are for debugging purposes only.
-b bytes
Specify the number of random bytes to include in the
output.
-x Output a hexidecimal instead of a binary seed.
-X Force output of a binary seed, even if standard output
is a tty
-v Turn on debugging message. Multiple -v options will
increase the debugging level. -h Display a summary of
options.
AUTHORS
Damien Miller <djm@mindrot.org>
SEE ALSO
ssh(1), ssh-add(1), ssh-keygen(1), sshd(8)
Page 1 (printed 10/26/05)
