Re: [RFC PATCH v12 3/4] Linux Random Number Generator

[Sandy Harris]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 5:08 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> 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.