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The problem with the Debian issue was that of a bad seed to the RNG. And I'd argue that getting good seed values is one of the main things that is appealing wi
by tjoff 9y ago
The problem with the Debian issue was that of a bad seed to the RNG.
And I'd argue that getting good seed values is one of the main things that is appealing with a hardware generator (especially at system boot).
You'd still have to use it though.
- tptacek 9y agoNo, that's not the Debian problem. The Debian problem was that they literally ifdef'd out the RNG refresh code. And, again, Debian's problem was in their version of the OpenSSL userland RNG. Applications that simply relied on /dev/urandom rather than OpenSSL's janky mess weren't impacted by the bug at all.
- tjoff 9y ago"Removing this code has the side effect of crippling the seeding process for the OpenSSL PRNG." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number_b.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number...
- tptacek 9y agoWhat's your point? The OpenSSL CSPRNG is a userland RNG, not Debian's built-in RNG.