3 ms·
On a separate note, I'm not sure I understood the problem with crediting writes to random as contributing that many entropy bits when the write happens by Admin
by caf 5y ago
On a separate note, I'm not sure I understood the problem with crediting writes to random as contributing that many entropy bits when the write happens by Admin & the pool isn't yet initialized. It seems like it would largely solve this class of problems without introducing any security issues, would it?
There are existing startup scripts out there that write, as root, completely predictable data (the example given is the kernel commandline in Android).
- rocqua 5y agoAt what point does "you made a willfully wrong program" override "we don't break userland"? Normally I would expect something like "we don't break documented and intended behavior we told userland to expect". It makes sense that Linux tries for a bit more than that, but if you do it too much you get almost instant ossification, which is bad.
- caf 5y agoThose programs weren't "willfully wrong". That status quo is that whatever you wrote would be potentially mixed into the pool, but not counted as adding any kind of unpredictability unless the ioctl() was used to specifically indicate this.