Removing the Linux /dev/random blocking pool

Posted Jan 8, 2020 13:30 UTC (Wed) by gebi (guest, #59940)
In reply to: Removing the Linux /dev/random blocking pool by k3ninho
Parent article: Removing the Linux /dev/random blocking pool

For all practical purposes and when using rng-tools(5) it does not matter.
The injected entropy is first encrypted with aes and rng-tools(5) has support for both rdrand and rdseed.

Removing the Linux /dev/random blocking pool

Posted Jan 8, 2020 15:44 UTC (Wed) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link] (1 responses)

But a stream of encrypted 0's (or 0xFF, as seems to be the case here) still adds precisely as much entropy as the key has to the pool. And if a buggy RDRAND is your only source of "entropy" (I know that shouldn't happen in practice), then the entire stream of random numbers is trivially predictable.

Removing the Linux /dev/random blocking pool

Posted Jan 8, 2020 16:13 UTC (Wed) by gebi (guest, #59940) [Link]

exactly, so it's still just "For all practical purposes and when using rng-tools(5) it does not matter."