Debian 2008 keys bug

Posted Jan 10, 2021 13:34 UTC (Sun) by aaronmdjones (subscriber, #119973)
In reply to: Debian 2008 keys bug by plugwash
Parent article: Bootstrappable builds

> Any key generation requires random numbers and AIUI openssh relied on openssl for all it's random number needs.

Back then, it did, yes. OpenSSH 6.5 (adding support for Ed25519 keys) didn't arrive for another 6 years, and OpenSSH 6.8 (allowing it to be built without OpenSSL) didn't arrive for another year after that. These days you can build it without, and then it will use urandom(4) [Linux, among others] or arc4random(3) [OpenBSD].