Re: Standardizing an MSR or other hypercall to get an RNG seed?

Theodore Ts'o
2014-09-19T22:05:37Z

On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 09:40:42AM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
> There is a huge disadvantage to the fact that CPUID is a user space
> instruction, though.

But if the goal is to provide something like getrandom(2) direct from
the Host OS, it's not necessarily harmful to allow the Guest ring 3
code to be able to fetch randomness in that way. The hypervisor can
implement rate limiting to protect against the guest using this too
frequently, but this is something that you should be doing for guest
ring 0 code anyway, since from the POV of the hypervisor Guest ring 0
is not necessarily any more trusted than Guest ring 3.

- Ted