[148047] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: [Cryptography] randomness +- entropy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kent Borg)
Wed Nov 6 13:59:26 2013
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 07:59:11 -0500
From: Kent Borg <kentborg@borg.org>
To: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>, John Kelsey <crypto.jmk@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20131105230949.GF14235@thunk.org>
Cc: Watson Ladd <watsonbladd@gmail.com>,
Cryptography <cryptography@metzdowd.com>,
RNG mlist <rng@lists.bitrot.info>, John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>
Errors-To: cryptography-bounces+crypto.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@metzdowd.com
On 11/05/2013 06:09 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> And if I made /dev/urandom reads block until the pool was initialized,
> I suspect that product managers would just tell the engineers to patch
> out the check, as opposed to doing something intelligent
I still suggest adding a *mechanism* to block urandom before it has any
entropy. And if you can sneak in defaults that mostly no one notices
but still help many...cool.
Those who don't like such a change, those who look deep enough to notice
the change, can set their defaults to something suitable for them.
(Leave helpful comments in the code for those who might find editing a
couple constants in their private kernel sources easier than managing
custom kernel parameters.)
But please add a mechanism as soon as possible, even if it is defaulted
to off.
RNGs should try very hard to not fail silently and emit bad data.
-kb
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