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Why does anyone even continue to bother arguing this? There are ways of mixing RDRAND into the entropy pool safely and this can be done easily. Why would you d
by feanaro 7y ago
Why does anyone even continue to bother arguing this?
There are ways of mixing RDRAND into the entropy pool safely and this can be done easily. Why would you deliberately choose to not mix RDRAND and use it directly instead? You wouldn't. It makes no sense. Therefore, RDRAND should be mixed into the pool, it is being mixed into the pool and there is no more reason to debate this.
- tytso 7y agoYes, and Linux has done it for years. The problem is whether or not RDRAND should be trusted in the absence of sufficient estimated entropy that it should be used to unblock the CRNG during the boot process. This is what CONFIG_RANDOM_TRUST_CPU or the random.trust_cpu=on on the boot command is all about. Should RDRAND be trusted in isolation? And I'm not going to answer that for you; a cypherpunk and someone working at the NSA might have different answers to that question. And it's fundamentally a social, not a technical question.
- throwaway2048 7y agoThe blocking CRNG (besides the necessary early seeding) is an entirely artificial problem however..