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1SSH-RAND-HELPER(8) OpenBSD System Manager's Manual SSH-RAND-HELPER(8)
2
3NAME
4 ssh-rand-helper - random number gatherer for OpenSSH
5
6SYNOPSIS
7 ssh-rand-hlper [-vxXh] [-b bytes]
8
9DESCRIPTION
10 ssh-rand-helper is a small helper program used by ssh(1), ssh-add(1),
11 ssh-agent(1), ssh-keygen(1), ssh-keyscan(1) and sshd(8) to gather random
12 numbers of cryptographic quality if the openssl(4) library has not been
13 configured to provide them itself.
14
15 Normally ssh-rand-helper will generate a strong random seed and provide
16 it to the calling program via standard output. If standard output is a
17 tty, ssh-rand-helper will instead print the seed in hexidecimal format
18 unless told otherwise.
19
20 ssh-rand-helper will by default gather random numbers from the system
21 commands listed in /etc/ssh/ssh_prng_cmds. The output of each of the
22 commands listed will be hashed and used to generate a random seed for the
23 calling program. ssh-rand-helper will also store seed files in
24 ~/.ssh/prng_seed between executions.
25
26 Alternately, ssh-rand-helper may be configured at build time to collect
27 random numbers from a EGD/PRNGd server via a unix domain or localhost tcp
28 socket.
29
30 This program is not intended to be run by the end-user, so the few com-
31 mandline options are for debugging purposes only.
32
33 -b bytes
34 Specify the number of random bytes to include in the output.
35
36 -x Output a hexidecimal instead of a binary seed.
37
38 -X Force output of a binary seed, even if standard output is a tty
39
40 -v Turn on debugging message. Multiple -v options will increase the
41 debugging level.
42
43 -h Display a summary of options.
44
45AUTHORS
46 Damien Miller <djm@mindrot.org>
47
48SEE ALSO
49 ssh(1), ssh-add(1), ssh-keygen(1), sshd(8)
50
51OpenBSD 4.7 April 14, 2002 1