[PATCH RFC] Disable save-entropy in jails

RW rwmaillists at googlemail.com
Wed Dec 25 18:46:16 UTC 2013


On Tue, 24 Dec 2013 16:04:53 -0800
Xin Li wrote:


> When reading from /dev/random, one essentially consumes entropy that
> is fed into the random device, and eventually it would cause a reseed.

Reads don't trigger reseeds in Yarrow. And both Yarrow and Fortuna are
designed so this isn't a problem. In any case reads that aren't under
the control of an unprivileged attacker make it harder to perform a
state-extension attack, not easier.

This kind of thing shouldn't be an issue for any non-blocking random
device that isn't quite badly broken. If it were, it would be better to
fix the device.



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