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Commit 48d6be95 authored by Theodore Ts'o's avatar Theodore Ts'o
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random: limit the contribution of the hw rng to at most half



For people who don't trust a hardware RNG which can not be audited,
the changes to add support for RDSEED can be troubling since 97% or
more of the entropy will be contributed from the in-CPU hardware RNG.

We now have a in-kernel khwrngd, so for those people who do want to
implicitly trust the CPU-based system, we could create an arch-rng
hw_random driver, and allow khwrng refill the entropy pool.  This
allows system administrator whether or not they trust the CPU (I
assume the NSA will trust RDRAND/RDSEED implicitly :-), and if so,
what level of entropy derating they want to use.

The reason why this is a really good idea is that if different people
use different levels of entropy derating, it will make it much more
difficult to design a backdoor'ed hwrng that can be generally
exploited in terms of the output of /dev/random when different attack
targets are using differing levels of entropy derating.

Signed-off-by: default avatarTheodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
parent c6e9d6f3
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