Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH 5/7] random: replace non-blocking pool with a Chacha20-based CRNG | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Date | Mon, 20 Jun 2016 11:52:10 -0700 |
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On 06/20/16 08:49, Stephan Mueller wrote: > Am Montag, 20. Juni 2016, 11:01:47 schrieb Theodore Ts'o: > > Hi Theodore, > >> >> So simply doing chacha20 encryption in a tight loop in the kernel >> might not be a good proxy for what would actually happen in real life >> when someone calls getrandom(2). (Another good question to ask is >> when someone might be needing to generate millions of 256-bit session >> keys per second, when the D-H setup, even if you were using ECCDH, >> would be largely dominating the time for the connection setup anyway.) > > Is speed everything we should care about? What about: > > - offloading of crypto operation from the CPU >
This sounds like a speed operation (and very unlikely to be a win given the usage).
> - potentially additional security features a hardware cipher may provide like > cache coloring attack resistance?
How about burning that bridge when and if we get to it? It sounds very hypothetical.
I guess I could add in some comments here about how a lot of these problems can be eliminated by offloading an entire DRNG into hardware, but I don't think it is productive.
-hpa
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