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Great! Let's follow it to its logical conclusion: () There should be only one kernel PRNG device () It should be seeded from keyboard presses, mouse movement
by ScottBurson 13y ago
Great! Let's follow it to its logical conclusion:
() There should be only one kernel PRNG device
() It should be seeded from keyboard presses, mouse movements, etc. (i.e. real entropy sources) at OS installation time (if there's a persistence mechanism) or at boot time (if there isn't)
() If called before being seeded, it should hang, but in practice this should never happen
() It should never hang thereafter
() If we accept DJB's argument that adding entropy later can be harmful (and since we've already agreed it's unnecessary), we shouldn't do it
() There should be a standard protocol by which a freshly cloned VM can be told it needs to reseed
So, how do we convince the kernel devs of this, and put an end to this whole argument?
- tptacek 13y agoI don't think that's the only logical conclusion one can come to after reading DJB. Periodically rekeying has the beneficial effect of adding some forward secrecy to your RNG, so losing the state once doesn't necessarily permanently bone you. People are working on a better Linux random driver.
- dlitz 13y agoThank you for being sane about this. Do you know if those folks are working on making /dev/random faster*? I'd really like to see even traditionally "non-cryptographic" RNG's (e.g. rand()) just use the kernel's CSPRNG.