3 ms·
What are the kind of boot/init processes that require the RNG? Is it only a requirement on some systems, or does basically every gameboy, laptop, soda machine e
by rad88 5y ago
What are the kind of boot/init processes that require the RNG? Is it only a requirement on some systems, or does basically every gameboy, laptop, soda machine etc have init processes that would need the RNG?
The issue that triggered this revert, if I'm understanding it, was that RNG reads had to be minimally decent and non-blocking already in order for a certain system to seed the RNG.
This is definitely breakage, but it'd be interesting to know about the less "reflexive" applications.
- rocqua 5y agoI believe there are quite a few systems that generate and install their own private-keys / certificates at boot time. Those should be rather unpredictable, being private-keys and all.
- RL_Quine 5y agoKASLR, for one. The original gameboys have absolutely no entropy sources other than reading uninitialized SRAM memory.
- toast0 5y agoLots of network things need (or desire anyway) randomness. A soda machine probably doesn't need randomness (unless it contacts a payment network), most early video game systems are deterministic, some games can have their 'random' state easily manipulated by user input. A laptop is likely to need randomness during boot. DHCP is supposed to have a random 4-byte XID in the discover message (to be matched by the client in responses), ipv6 slaac privacy wants randomness too. 802.1x (flawed as it is) needs random values as well. If you're doing those, probably you've got a live network cable which might provide some entropy. Things like address space randomization want to happen as well.