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Re: Patch: new random pseudodevice



On Fri, 09 Dec 2011, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
On Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 12:14:40PM -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
Let me put it this way: before, you may have thought you were getting some kind of "true" randomness. You weren't. Now, you still aren't, but at least what sits between you and the entropy source is a lot more clear, and a lot better analyzed.

I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on that, so I'll take your word for it.

However, when applications use /dev/random, we could consider a "request" to be a single read from the device. This also has the appealing property that it aligns with how the underlying generator (CTR_DRBG) counts "requests". That way, in practice, each read from /dev/random would get a fresh AES key -- and most application reads from /dev/random, which may block, are very small.

I think that, in practice, that is about as close to meeting the expectations of the application authors as possible.

I like that idea.

--apb (Alan Barrett)


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