Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 18 Aug 2002 00:24:17 -0500 | From | Oliver Xymoron <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] (0/4) Entropy accounting fixes |
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On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 09:51:32PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Sat, 17 Aug 2002, Oliver Xymoron wrote: > > > > > We might as well get rid of /dev/random altogether if it is not useful. > > > > If it's not accounting properly, it's not useful. > > My point exactly. > > And if it isn't useful, it might as well not be there. > > And your accounting isn't "proper" either. It's not useful on a > network-only device. It's just swinging the error the _other_ way, but > that's still an error. The point of /dev/random was to have an estimate of > the amount of truly random data in the algorithm - and the important word > here is _estimate_. Not "minimum number", nor "maximum number".
The key word is actually conservative, as in conservative estimate. Conservative here means less than or equal to.
> And yes, it still mixes in the random data, but since it doesn't account > for the randomness, that only helps /dev/urandom. > > And helping /dev/urandom is _fine_. Don't get me wrong. It just doesn't > make /dev/random any more useful - quite the reverse. Your patch will just > make more people say "/dev/random isn't useful, use /dev/urandom instead".
No, it says /dev/random is primarily useful for generating large (>>160 bit) keys.
> Do you not see the fallacy of that approach? You're trying to make > /dev/random safer, but what you are actually _doing_ is to make people not > use it, and use /dev/urandom instead. Which makes all of the estimation > code useless.
> THIS is my argument. Randomness is like security: if you make it too hard > to use, then you're shooting yourself in the foot, since people end up > unable to practically use it.
Actually, half of the point here is in fact to make /dev/urandom safer too, by allowing mixing of untrusted data that would otherwise compromise /dev/random. 99.9% of users aren't using network sampling currently, after these patches we can turn it on for everyone and still sleep well at night. See?
> The point of /dev/random was to make it _easy_ for people to get random > numbers that we can feel comfortable about. The point of the accounting is > not a theoretical argument, but a way to make us feel _comfortable_ with > the amount of true randomness we're seeding in. It was not meant as a > theoretical exercise.
That is an interesting point. A counterpoint is if we account so much as 1 bit of entropy per network interrupt on a typical system, the system will basically _always_ feel comfortable (see /proc/interrupts). It will practically never block and thus it is again identical to /dev/urandom.
With my scheme, it's usefully distinguished from /dev/urandom for the purposes of things such as one-time public key generation.
See my note to RML about who actually uses it currently.
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