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Okay, that's fair for install media installing to a physical machine such as a desktop. What about virtual machines / machines booting off an image? We can't p
by deathanatos 7y ago
Okay, that's fair for install media installing to a physical machine such as a desktop.
What about virtual machines / machines booting off an image? We can't put a seed in the image, or it'll get distributed to all downstream consumers.
Also, there's the case posed in response to my first comment, about IOT devices which would ship with some factory-installed image.
(I suppose there are some novel ways one could work around this such as somehow keeping a pool of one-shot images ready w/ just the seed added to them, but I don't feel like this is how real-world systems work. E.g., an AMI in AWS?)
- aquabeagle 7y agohttp://man.openbsd.org/man4/viornd.4 http://man.openbsd.org/man4/viornd.4
- wbl 7y agoHW rng is essential then
- ori_b 7y ago> What about virtual machines / machines booting off an image? We can't put a seed in the image, or it'll get distributed to all downstream consumers. Mitigations within mitigations. Having one random seed per VM image that gets installed is better than having nothing at all -- now, an attacker needs to have your install image. Then the hardware RNG and the virtio random drivers help mix into that seed. Given that presumably you've already booted the image for testing, you've probably already generated the SSH keys that you need to be concerned about -- so you'd probably need to take care to regenerate them securely in any case, from a running system that has started to gather entropy from all the sources it can get its hands on, including the boot loader. And, ideally part of the imaging process would write some random data to the image. But I agree, most people wouldn't even think of doing that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]