Re: [PATCH v1] random: block in /dev/urandom

Linus Torvalds
2022-03-22T18:29:43Z

On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 11:19 AM Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com> wrote:
>
> The first point is why we had to revert this patch. But the second one
> is actually a bit dangerous: you might write in a perfectly good seed to
> /dev/urandom, but what you read out for the subsequent seed may be
> complete deterministic crap. This is because the call to write_pool()
> goes right into the input pool and doesn't touch any of the "fast init"
> stuff, where we immediately mutate the crng key during early boot.

Christ, how I hate the crazy "no entropy means that we can't use it".

It's a disease, I tell you.

And it seems to be the direct cause of this misfeature.

By all means the code can say "I can't credit this as entropy", but
the fact that it then doesn't even mix it into the fast pool is just
wrong, wrong, wrong.

I think *that* is what we should fix. The fact is, urandom has
long-standing semantics as "don't block", and that it shouldn't care
about the (often completely insane) entropy crediting rules.

But that "don't care about entropy rules" should then also mean "oh,
we'll mix things in even if we don't credit entropy".

I hope that's the easy fix you are thinking about.

Linus