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Verify entropy gathering

Open jsha opened this issue 11 years ago • 2 comments

We should double-check the list of entropy sources that the kernel we use can collect from, and add to it if necessary.

jsha avatar Jul 24 '14 21:07 jsha

In particular I worry about this because OpenWRT runs rngd to feed output of /dev/urandom into /dev/random. This essentially fakes out the kernel's entropy measurement so it thinks there is always sufficient entropy in case a poorly written program attempts to read from /dev/random instead of /dev/urandom and winds up blocking.

Using rngd in this way is probably harmless - everything should just be using /dev/urandom - but the fact that /dev/random is likely to block indicates entropy is probably not being collected from enough sources.

jsha avatar Jul 30 '14 15:07 jsha

More discussion in security.txt.

jsha avatar Jul 30 '14 15:07 jsha