From: Sandy Harris <sandyinchina@gmail.com>
To: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>,
"Stephan Müller" <smueller@chronox.de>,
"Greg Kroah-Hartman" <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
"Jason A. Donenfeld" <jason@zx2c4.com>,
"Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de>,
"Linux Crypto Mailing List" <linux-crypto@vger.kernel.org>,
LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v12 3/4] Linux Random Number Generator
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2017 21:00:10 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CACXcFmmFGYb-JteJZB8gS+uGJZ4zNLMU=AwPQf0td+xiG0+9Qw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20170718210816.o6c4iziaqj5dnnd3@thunk.org>
On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 5:08 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> I've been trying to take the best features and suggestions from your
> proposal and integrating them into /dev/random already.
A good approach.
> Things that I've chosen not take is basically because I disbelieve
> that the Jitter RNG is valid. ...
The biggest problem with random(4) is that you cannot generate good
output without a good seed & just after boot, especially first boot on
a new system, you may not have enough entropy. A user space process
cannot do it soon enough and all the in-kernel solutions (unless you
have a hardware RNG) pose difficulties.
The only really good solution I know of is to find a way to provide a
chunk of randomness early in the boot process. John Denker has a good
discussion of doing this by modifying the kernel image & Ted talks of
doing it via the boot loader. Neither looks remarkably easy. Other
approaches like making the kernel read a seed file or passing a
parameter on the kernel command line have been suggested but, if I
recall right, rejected.
As I see it, the questions about Jitter, or any other in-kernel
generator based on timing, are whether it is good enough to be useful
until we have one of the above solutions or useful as a
defense-in-depth trick after we have one. I'd say yes to both.
There's been a lot of analysis. Stephan has a detailed rationale & a
lot of test data in his papers & the Havege papers also discuss
getting entropy from timer operations. I'd say the best paper is
McGuire et al:
https://static.lwn.net/images/conf/rtlws11/random-hardware.pdf
There is enough there to convince me that grabbing some (256?) bits
from such a generator early in the initialization is worthwhile.
> So I have been trying to do the evolution thing already.
> ...
> I'm obviously biased, but I don't see I see the Raison d'Etre for
> merging LRNG into the kernel.
Nor I.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-07-19 1:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 40+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-07-18 7:57 [RFC PATCH v12 0/4] /dev/random - a new approach Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 7:57 ` [RFC PATCH v12 1/4] crypto: make Jitter RNG directly accessible Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 8:30 ` Greg Kroah-Hartman
2017-07-18 8:40 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 8:49 ` Greg Kroah-Hartman
2017-07-18 8:53 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 9:02 ` Arnd Bergmann
2017-07-18 9:10 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 9:16 ` Arnd Bergmann
2017-07-18 9:17 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 7:58 ` [RFC PATCH v12 2/4] random: conditionally compile code depending on LRNG Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 8:13 ` Arnd Bergmann
2017-07-18 8:37 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 8:47 ` Arnd Bergmann
2017-07-18 8:50 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 7:59 ` [RFC PATCH v12 3/4] Linux Random Number Generator Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 8:32 ` Greg Kroah-Hartman
2017-07-18 8:45 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 8:52 ` Greg Kroah-Hartman
2017-07-18 14:37 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 21:08 ` Theodore Ts'o
2017-07-19 1:00 ` Sandy Harris [this message]
2017-07-19 1:51 ` Theodore Ts'o
2017-07-19 6:25 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-30 10:44 ` Pavel Machek
2017-07-23 18:05 ` Sandy Harris
2017-07-23 21:47 ` Theodore Ts'o
2017-07-19 6:22 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-19 6:34 ` Greg Kroah-Hartman
2017-07-19 17:26 ` Theodore Ts'o
2017-07-20 19:00 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-21 3:08 ` Theodore Ts'o
2017-07-21 8:57 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-21 15:09 ` Arnd Bergmann
2017-07-21 15:17 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 8:52 ` Greg Kroah-Hartman
2017-07-18 7:59 ` [RFC PATCH v12 4/4] LRNG - enable compile Stephan Müller
2017-07-18 8:51 ` Arnd Bergmann
2017-07-18 8:56 ` Stephan Müller
2017-07-21 11:30 [RFC PATCH v12 3/4] Linux Random Number Generator Jeffrey Walton
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