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From: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
To: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Stephan Mueller <smueller@chronox.de>,
	Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>,
	Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
	"Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@zx2c4.com>,
	"Ahmed S. Darwish" <darwish.07@gmail.com>,
	Lennart Poettering <mzxreary@0pointer.de>,
	"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>,
	"Alexander E. Patrakov" <patrakov@gmail.com>,
	Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>,
	Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>,
	Ext4 Developers List <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>,
	linux-man <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/8] Rework random blocking
Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2019 07:29:20 +0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <26B7EEAE-1166-4B45-9534-E00C5B2767C1@amacapital.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20191226140423.GB3158@mit.edu>


>> On Dec 26, 2019, at 10:04 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 01:03:34PM +0100, Stephan Mueller wrote:
>> Agreed. I was just trying to outline that the removal of the blocking_pool is
>> a good thing. Even when we decide that random.c should receive a TRNG, we do
>> not need to re-add a blocking pool, but can easily use the existing ChaCha20
>> DRNG (most likely with its own instance).
> 
> Well, it depends on what you mean by "TRNG" --- the ChaCha20 DRNG only
> has a state of 256 bits.  So if you want to only depend on "true
> entropy" you can't extract more than 256 bits without violating that
> assumption, at least if you're using a very strict definition of TRNG.
> 
> By getting rid of the blocking pool, and making /dev/random work like
> getrandom with flags set to 0, we're effectively abandoning any kind
> of assertion that /dev/random is some kind of TRNG.  This is not
> insane; this is what the *BSD's have always done.
> 
> But once we do this, and /dev/random takes on the semantics of "block
> until the CRNG has been initialized, and then it won't block after
> that", if we change it so that it now has some different semantics,
> such as "one you extract a 256-bit key, the read from /dev/random will
> block until we can refill it, which might take seconds, minutes or
> hours", will be considered a regression, and we can't do that.

I don’t think Stephan was proposing that. He was proposing a way to implement a new interface that blocks.

> 
> Of course, we can hope that people will be using getrandom() and there
> will be very few new users of the /dev/random pathname.  But nothing
> is ever guaranteed..
> 
>                       - Ted

  reply	other threads:[~2019-12-26 23:29 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 43+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-12-23  8:20 [PATCH v3 0/8] Rework random blocking Andy Lutomirski
2019-12-23  8:20 ` [PATCH v3 1/8] random: Don't wake crng_init_wait when crng_init == 1 Andy Lutomirski
2020-01-07 20:42   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-23  8:20 ` [PATCH v3 2/8] random: Add a urandom_read_nowait() for random APIs that don't warn Andy Lutomirski
2020-01-07 20:43   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-23  8:20 ` [PATCH v3 3/8] random: Add GRND_INSECURE to return best-effort non-cryptographic bytes Andy Lutomirski
2020-01-07 20:44   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-23  8:20 ` [PATCH v3 4/8] random: Ignore GRND_RANDOM in getentropy(2) Andy Lutomirski
2020-01-07 20:44   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-23  8:20 ` [PATCH v3 5/8] random: Make /dev/random be almost like /dev/urandom Andy Lutomirski
2020-01-07 21:02   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-23  8:20 ` [PATCH v3 6/8] random: Remove the blocking pool Andy Lutomirski
2020-01-07 21:03   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-23  8:20 ` [PATCH v3 7/8] random: Delete code to pull data into pools Andy Lutomirski
2020-01-07 21:03   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-23  8:20 ` [PATCH v3 8/8] random: Remove kernel.random.read_wakeup_threshold Andy Lutomirski
2020-01-07 21:04   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-26  9:29 ` [PATCH v3 0/8] Rework random blocking Stephan Müller
2019-12-26 10:03   ` Matthew Garrett
2019-12-26 11:40     ` Stephan Mueller
2019-12-26 11:12   ` Andy Lutomirski
2019-12-26 12:03     ` Stephan Mueller
2019-12-26 12:46       ` Andy Lutomirski
2019-12-27  9:55         ` Stephan Mueller
2019-12-26 14:04       ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-26 23:29         ` Andy Lutomirski [this message]
2019-12-27 10:29           ` Stephan Mueller
2019-12-27 13:04             ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-27 21:22               ` Stephan Mueller
2019-12-27 22:08                 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-28  2:06                   ` Andy Lutomirski
2019-12-29 14:49                     ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-12-29 15:08                       ` Andy Lutomirski
2019-12-28  7:01                   ` Willy Tarreau
2020-01-09 22:02                   ` Kurt Roeckx
2020-01-09 22:02                     ` Kurt Roeckx
2020-01-09 22:40                     ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-09 22:40                       ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-09 23:02                       ` Kurt Roeckx
2020-01-09 23:02                         ` Kurt Roeckx
2020-01-10  7:53                         ` Stephan Mueller
2020-01-10  7:53                           ` Stephan Mueller
2020-01-10  0:30                     ` Andy Lutomirski

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