yhsm-linux-add-entropy(1)				      General Commands Manual					 yhsm-linux-add-entropy(1)

NAME

       yhsm-linux-add-entropy - Seed the Linux entropy pool with data from YubiHSM TRNG

SYNOPSIS

       yhsm-linux-add-entropy [options]

DESCRIPTION

       The YubiHSM uses "Avalanche Noise" TRNG together with USB SOF jitter sampling to feed a DRBG_CTR algorithm (NIST publication SP800-90). The
       result has been verified as being random data of good quality by at least one third party cryptographer.  <http://sartryck.idg.se/Art/
       Yubihsm_1_TW072011.html>

       Use  this  program  to add random data from the YubiHSM to the entropy pool of your Linux operating system. This is useful whenever lots of
       random data is needed, such as when generating chryptographic keys (GPG-keys), on a server terminating SSL sessions etc.

       You may run this script from cron, or in a while-loop. Make sure it does not run at the same time as something else accessing  the  YubiHSM
       though, or the two tasks may interrupt each other - probably making both fail.

OPTIONS

       -D, --device
	      device file name (default: /dev/ttyACM0).

       -v, --verbose
	      enable verbose operation.

       -c, --count
	      number of iterations to run (default: 100).

       -r, --ratio
	      bits per byte read to use. 8 is probably fine, but as a conservative default 2 is used.

       --debug
	      enable debug printout, including all data sent to/from YubiHSM.

EXIT STATUS

       0   Entropy added successfully

       1   Failure

BUGS

       Report python-pyhsm/yhsm-linux-add-entropy bugs in the issue tracker <https://github.com/Yubico/python-pyhsm/issues/>

SEE ALSO

       The python-pyhsm home page <https://github.com/Yubico/python-pyhsm/>

       YubiHSMs can be obtained from Yubico <http://www.yubico.com/>.

python-pyhsm							   December 2011					 yhsm-linux-add-entropy(1)