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Also,the problems seems mostly to be around Linux running in a VM rather than on actual hardware. Would it be possible to have the host urandom show up as a hw
by yxhuvud 5y ago
Also,the problems seems mostly to be around Linux running in a VM rather than on actual hardware. Would it be possible to have the host urandom show up as a hw random number generator to the VM and then use that for initiating things? Seems less hacky than having to fiddle with seeds. Dunno how possible that is though.
- loeg 5y agohttps://wiki.qemu.org/Features/VirtIORNG https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/VirtIORNG
- AnssiH 5y agoYes, and that is commonly used. But Linux must continue to work even on VMs without that, and that is the hard part.
- pm215 5y agoYou can do that where for instance the VM has PCI and can plug in a virtio RNG device. But a lot of the QEMU setups Guenter Roeck reported issues with are emulating real (usually old) hardware which didn't have a PCI bus, or any other hardware RNG interface.
- mjevans 5y agoAlso lighter systems such as routers (E.G. many OpenWRT targets)
- loeg 5y agoThe VMs described in the article are (faithfully) emulating real hardware lacking unpredictable timers or other sources of entropy. It’s not exclusively a VM problem; it’s a weird/old hardware problem, too.