[Cryptography] randomness +- entropy

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 04:39:17AM +0100, Hannes Frederic Sowa wrote:
> 
> I am looking for other candidates which could be migrated (and are worth
> it, given my limited time to work on this).  rc80211_minstrel_ht_init does
> not look like a perfect fit, but I will have a fresh look tomorrow.

>From my google searches on the minstrel algorithm (and I'm not enough
of a networking expert to be authoratative), it appears that it just
needs some random retry times for its learning algorithm.  It appears
that it might be better if the random retry times chosen unique per
host[1], but it didn't appear to have any security significance that I
could see.

[1] That's the one problem with prandom_init(); before it tries to
reseed using get_random_bytes() as a late_initcall(), the initial
state used for the prng doesn't appear to be very host-unique.

It would be great to have a networking person take a closer look at
this.  It's been on my todo list to send patch to net-dev, but
November has been crazy for me.

					- Ted