Re: Linux 5.3-rc8

[Willy Tarreau]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 05:34:56PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 09:27:44AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> > Does anybody believe that 128 bits of randomness is a good basis for a
> > long-term secure key?
> 
> Yes, it's exactly what you'd expect for an AES 128 key, which is still 
> considered to be secure.

AES keys are for symmetrical encryption and thus as such are short-lived.
We're back to what Linus was saying about the fact that our urandom is
already very good for such use cases, it should just not be used to
produce long-lived keys (i.e. asymmetrical).

However I'm worried regarding this precise patch about the fact that
delays will add up. I think that once we've failed to wait for a first
process, we've broken any hypothetical trust in terms of random quality
so there's no point continuing to wait for future requests.

Willy