Re: Revised draft of random(7) man page for review

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav-H+wXaHxf7aLQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org>]

On Sun, 2016-11-20 at 10:14 +0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> Hello Nikos,

> > > 
> > > Obviously, no one knows of such a vulnerability, and I'm fairly
> > > confident that there won't be such a vulnerability across the
> > > different ways we've used to generate the urandom source --- but
> > > some
> > > people are professional paranoids, and would argue that we
> > > shouldn't
> > > make bulk output of the CSPRNG available for no good reason, just
> > > in
> > > case.
> > 
> > The above is certainly accurate, however, I think that such a
> > discussion or text, when reflected to a man-page is going to cause
> > problems. The audience of a man-page are not crypto people, and
> > seeing such text would create confusion rather than clarify how
> > these
> > devices/apis should be used. The *if* part is not put into a
> > perspective, suggesting that such an *if* is possible. However, if
> > one clarifies, i.e., in that case, your TLS or SSH connection is
> > most
> > likely broken as well, and not because of any attack on
> > /dev/urandom,
> > then one can see that we are heading towards a theoretical
> > discussion.
> > 
> > My suggestion, on that particular text would be to remove it, but
> > make it explicit somewhere in the text that all the assurances for
> > the devices depend on the crypto primitives, rather than describing
> > risks that may arise on particular usage patterns *if* primitives
> > are
> > broken.
> 
> Thanks. This makes sense to me. Following your suggestion, 
> I plan to apply the patch below. Does it seem okay to you?

Looks fine to me.

regards,
Nikos

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