[Cryptography] randomness +- entropy
Kent Borg
kentborg at borg.org
Wed Nov 6 07:59:11 EST 2013
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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