4 ms·
Gah. Another brain-damaged system that implements complex (and, no doubt, broken) "entropy estimation" with a goal of delivering "information theoretic" securi
by nullc 11y ago
Gah. Another brain-damaged system that implements complex (and, no doubt, broken) "entropy estimation" with a goal of delivering "information theoretic" security that doesn't even have a structure where information theoretic security could actually be proven.
To the extent that any applications exist where a information theoretic RNG was required, this scheme does not provide one. Instead, it continues the to offer an interface that causes confusion and insecurity without an apparent benefit.
- apeace 11y agoHas anyone offered a better patch? I'm genuinely curious and don't know.
- tptacek 11y agoWhat's "a better patch"? We need to have a shared understanding of the problem before we can evaluate solutions.
- jwilkins 11y agoUnpredictable and unbiased source of bytes, even on server machines and virtualized hardware at boot time.
- zackelan 11y agoA patch [0] that added Fortuna [1] support to Linux was offered over 10 years ago. Fortuna specifically addresses the problems of entropy estimation that the grandparent comment brings up: "making any kind of estimate of the amount of entropy is extremely difficult, if not impossible. It depends heavily on how much the attacker knows or can know, but that information is not available to the developers during the design phase." "Fortuna solves the problem of having to define entropy estimators by getting rid of them." 0: https://jlcooke.ca/random/ https://jlcooke.ca/random/ 1: https://www.schneier.com/cryptography/paperfiles/fortuna.pdf https://www.schneier.com/cryptography/paperfiles/fortuna.pdf
- gajjanag 11y ago+1. As someone who has worked in the field of information theory, I strongly dislike the abuse of its usage here. Funny that the term "information theoretic" is used with not even one "theorem" in the linked document.