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Not only did it happen before, just TODAY I had to fight back an attempt by a Red Hat engineer who wanted to add a configuration option which would once again a

by tytso 13y ago

Not only did it happen before, just TODAY I had to fight back an attempt by a Red Hat engineer who wanted to add a configuration option which would once again allow RDRAND to be used directly, bypassing the entropy pool: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/5/212 https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/5/212

Create 13y ago
"It's unlikely that Intel (for example) was paid off by the US Government to do this, but it's impossible for them to prove otherwise --- especially since Bull Mountain is documented to use AES as a whitener. Hence, the output of an evil, trojan-horse version of RDRAND is statistically indistinguishable from an RDRAND implemented to the specifications claimed by Intel. Short of using a tunnelling electronic microscope to reverse engineer an Ivy Bridge chip and disassembling and analyzing the CPU microcode, there's no way for us to tell for sure." --- "The NSA's codeword for its decryption program, Bullrun, is taken from a major battle of the American civil war. Its British counterpart, Edgehill" "N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.”" -- http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryp... -- Bull Mountain, is Intel's code name for both the RdRand instruction and the underlying random number generator (RNG) hardware implementation. -- bull [mountain|hill] [intel|processor] http://www.googlewhack.com/ http://www.googlewhack.com/ https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/ http://subrabbit.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/how-much-entropy-in-that-password/ http://subrabbit.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/how-much-entropy-i...
rauar 13y ago
kudos. did Linus ever comment on the roll-back ?

by tytso 13y ago

Create 13y ago

"It's unlikely that Intel (for example) was paid off by the US Government to do this, but it's impossible for them to prove otherwise --- especially since Bull Mountain is documented to use AES as a whitener. Hence, the output of an evil, trojan-horse version of RDRAND is statistically indistinguishable from an RDRAND implemented to the specifications claimed by Intel. Short of using a tunnelling electronic microscope to reverse engineer an Ivy Bridge chip and disassembling and analyzing the CPU microcode, there's no way for us to tell for sure." --- "The NSA's codeword for its decryption program, Bullrun, is taken from a major battle of the American civil war. Its British counterpart, Edgehill" "N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.”" -- http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryp... -- Bull Mountain, is Intel's code name for both the RdRand instruction and the underlying random number generator (RNG) hardware implementation. -- bull [mountain|hill] [intel|processor] http://www.googlewhack.com/ http://www.googlewhack.com/ https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/ http://subrabbit.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/how-much-entropy-in-that-password/ http://subrabbit.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/how-much-entropy-i...

rauar 13y ago

kudos. did Linus ever comment on the roll-back ?