[Cryptography] OpenSSL CSPRNG work

[Mark Steward]

On Thu, Jul 6, 2017 at 1:42 AM, Nemo <nemo at self-evident.org> wrote:

> Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> writes:
>
> > * Theodore Ts'o:
> >
> >> The only thing you can do is what getrandom(2) does, which is block.
> >
> > That's a non-starter because it would halt the boot process.  In the
> > futrue, we will need something like arc4random during process
> > initialization.  And if we block there, the system will never proceed
> > to the point where it generates more entropy.
>
> Wait, so you are adding a function with the same (ill-chosen) name as
> the BSDs, but giving it subtly different and less secure semantics?
>
>
I'm interested in what it will be needed for in the future. Why would glibc
need large amounts of good quality random shortly after first boot, in a
scenario where the owner can't provide randomness in advance?

If good randomness is really becoming critical to early startup, does it
make sense to treat it like a broken filesystem and explicitly halt?


Mark
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