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My point is that you don't have to trust any particular source of randomness. NSA can backdoor RDRAND all they want. As long as there is a single legit source o
by upofadown 7y ago
My point is that you don't have to trust any particular source of randomness. NSA can backdoor RDRAND all they want. As long as there is a single legit source of randomness XORed in then the NSA is just wasting their time.
So having options to remove some sources is pointless and can only make things worse, never better.
- tytso 7y agoSure, and that's why we still have the entropy pool in Linux. It's where we do the mixing. My apologies if I didn't understand the point you were making. And yes, I would love to see us adding more entropy sources in the future. The problem is I don't have a lot of time, and a lot of other projects to work on, but I've been trying to recruit people to add support to pass entropy from UEFI into the kernel (which requires changes to Grub, NERF, Coreboot, etc.), being able to pass entropy from one kernel to the next when using kexec, etc. I can't do it all myself; this is something that requires a lot of people to make things better.
- dependenttypes 7y agoCheck out https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html Yes, xorring RDRAND with your existing secret can hurt security in certain cases.