Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG [LWN.net]

Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG

Posted Jun 25, 2015 16:47 UTC (Thu) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
Parent article: Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG

I thought that Intel's RDRAND/RDSEED instructions were targeted at producing high volume entropy streams for the hypervisor with a thundering herd of guests scenario?

I realize there's tin-foil hat principles at play with RDRAND (which I applaud) but shouldn't any add-on entropy device be compared against fairly common platform integrated hardware (at least in the server farm world)?

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Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG

Posted Jun 25, 2015 16:50 UTC (Thu) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

I've checked a few systems and all of my desktop/laptops support rdrand, including a 2013 vintage laptop. Eg.

```
grep rdrand /proc/cpuinfo | head -1
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf eagerfpu pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm ida arat epb pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase smep erms xsaveopt
```

Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG

Posted Jun 25, 2015 18:04 UTC (Thu) by mstone_ (subscriber, #66309) [Link]

No low-cost RNG can compete with intel's RDRAND implementation for speed. The only reason to use an add-on RNG is that you don't fully trust RDRAND.