Re: [PATCH] random: add blocking facility to urandom

Jarod Wilson
2011-09-12T14:01:04Z

Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Sep 2011, Steve Grubb wrote:
>> But what I was trying to say is that we can't depend on these supplemental hardware
>> devices like TPM because we don't have access to the proprietary technical details
>> that would be necessary to supplement the analysis. And when it comes to TPM chips, I
>> bet each chip has different details and entropy sources and entropy estimations and
>> rates. Those details we can't get at, so we can't solve the problem by including that
>> hardware. That is the point I was trying to make. :)
>
> Well, there is enough prove out there that the hardware you're using
> is a perfect random number generator by itself.
>
> So stop complaining about not having access to TPM chips if you can
> create an entropy source just by (ab)using the inherent randomness of
> modern CPU architectures to refill your entropy pool on the fly when
> the need arises w/o imposing completely unintuitive thresholds and
> user visible API changes.

We started out going down that path:

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-crypto@vger.kernel.org/msg05778.html

We hit a bit of a roadblock with it though.

--
Jarod Wilson
jarod@redhat.com