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GnuPG 1.4.23 for DOS (Announce)

posted by bencollver Homepage, 09.05.2024, 16:32

Thanks for trying again and posting your screenshot. Is this MS-DOS 6.22? What's it running on?

Yesterday i tinkered with sample.c and sample.exe from the NOISE driver. I learned that /dev/random$ will effectively block indefinitely after the NOISE driver entropy pool becomes empty. It won't generate random bytes unless it has sufficient entropy. The documentation says that the NOISE driver's entropy estimation is relatively conservative.

Yesterday i was able to work around it by adding the /d flag to include disk timing data into the entropy pool. I generated about a half dozen or so RSA keypairs on MS-DOS 6.22 running in qemu, and it rapidly succeeded every time.

From your screenshot, my guess is that GPG was able to read enough random bytes to generate the first half of the key pair, and it blocked in the second half because the NOISE driver ran out of entropy.

The documentation states that you can collect entropy ahead of time. This is just speculation on my part: Maybe it would help to do something disk intensive before generating a keypair? The most disk intensive thing i can think of is compiling a big program with DJGPP. :-)

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