3 ms·

You're right in an academic sense - they're completely comparable. In reality, the difference is that we can guarantee 100% of systems to work without the hard

You're right in an academic sense - they're completely comparable. In reality, the difference is that we can guarantee 100% of systems to work without the hardware RNG. Every binary blob we remove removes support for hardware and 'breaks' the OS for a subset of the users. No one* is going to fire up an OS and go "Hey, this OS doesn't use my hardware RNG! This OS is broken!" They will, however, fire it up and go "Hey, this OS doesn't support my network adapter! This OS is broken!" Security versus functionality. It's always a trade-off. The most secure system is the one that does nothing - everything past there is adding functionality at the expense of an increased attack surface. * To within a margin of error.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
I don't know if they're that much different. If you turn off the hardware RNG then generating random numbers becomes significantly slower. Maybe most people don't care, but I expect most people also don't care if their network card doesn't do TOE as a result of you shipping an open source driver that isn't feature complete rather than a binary blob driver that is. The flaw in your argument is the assumption that the drawback of using a software RNG instead of a hardware RNG is inherently less than the drawback of using an open source driver instead of a proprietary binary blob driver. There may exist specific circumstances where this actually the case (as is obvious if there is no open source driver whatsoever), but that isn't the immutable state of the world. If you take this kind of security to be a Serious Issue then it demands for engineering effort (or community pressure) to be directed toward the goal of having published source code for all hardware drivers. One of the ways you can do that is by refusing to ship binary blobs (as Debian does), which creates some trouble for Debian, but also creates some trouble for the hardware vendors who now have customers avoiding their hardware because it involves more trouble than a competitor's hardware. The typical response to this is the argument that not enough people run these operating systems to make the hardware manufacturers care, so you do more harm to yourself than you do to them. But that's ignoring the demographics. The primary constituency of Unix-like operating systems is the likes of IT professionals, systems administrators and software developers. These are the people who buy computer hardware by the pallet. Hardware manufacturers do not want those people to notice them in a bad way. This is incidentally why the state of open source GPU drivers is so much worse than the state of e.g. open source network drivers. When the local BOFH goes to buy a thousand rack units of Debian servers, he generally cares a lot more about the NIC than whether it will do 3D hardware acceleration. But that's going to change soon enough as GPGPU gets popular in the datacenter.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago

I don't know if they're that much different. If you turn off the hardware RNG then generating random numbers becomes significantly slower. Maybe most people don't care, but I expect most people also don't care if their network card doesn't do TOE as a result of you shipping an open source driver that isn't feature complete rather than a binary blob driver that is. The flaw in your argument is the assumption that the drawback of using a software RNG instead of a hardware RNG is inherently less than the drawback of using an open source driver instead of a proprietary binary blob driver. There may exist specific circumstances where this actually the case (as is obvious if there is no open source driver whatsoever), but that isn't the immutable state of the world. If you take this kind of security to be a Serious Issue then it demands for engineering effort (or community pressure) to be directed toward the goal of having published source code for all hardware drivers. One of the ways you can do that is by refusing to ship binary blobs (as Debian does), which creates some trouble for Debian, but also creates some trouble for the hardware vendors who now have customers avoiding their hardware because it involves more trouble than a competitor's hardware. The typical response to this is the argument that not enough people run these operating systems to make the hardware manufacturers care, so you do more harm to yourself than you do to them. But that's ignoring the demographics. The primary constituency of Unix-like operating systems is the likes of IT professionals, systems administrators and software developers. These are the people who buy computer hardware by the pallet. Hardware manufacturers do not want those people to notice them in a bad way. This is incidentally why the state of open source GPU drivers is so much worse than the state of e.g. open source network drivers. When the local BOFH goes to buy a thousand rack units of Debian servers, he generally cares a lot more about the NIC than whether it will do 3D hardware acceleration. But that's going to change soon enough as GPGPU gets popular in the datacenter.