From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos Subject: Re: Revised draft of random(7) man page for review Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2016 11:20:45 +0100 Message-ID: <1479810045.31825.20.camel@redhat.com> References: <50af97ae-e65e-30f3-c5ec-6f2129711f39@gmail.com> <20161115150407.jy7ix2i6dw5nyhbk@thunk.org> <1261638383.493623.1479591556767.JavaMail.zimbra@redhat.com> <49c33335-5933-e0bd-3e5e-d51ff051425f@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <49c33335-5933-e0bd-3e5e-d51ff051425f-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> Sender: linux-man-owner-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org To: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" , Theodore Ts'o Cc: Laurent Georget , Laurent Georget , Luke Bratch , Ivan Babrou , matt-6J8q6J5oQjkQrrorzV6ljw@public.gmane.org, Heinrich Schuchardt , linux-man-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org, Thomas =?ISO-8859-1?Q?H=FChn?= , Stephan Mueller , Carl =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Winb=E4ck?= , mpm-VDJrAJ4Gl5ZBDgjK7y7TUQ@public.gmane.org List-Id: linux-man@vger.kernel.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 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html