Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random [LWN.net]

Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random

Posted Mar 31, 2022 13:39 UTC (Thu) by pj (subscriber, #4506)
Parent article: Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random

Maybe have writes to /dev/random credit the entropy pool but writes to /dev/urandom do not? It's approximately symmetrical to their read semantics.

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Posted Mar 31, 2022 15:48 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

That sounds dangerous as long as the `nobody` user can perform `</dev/zero >/dev/random`.

Posted Apr 11, 2022 14:53 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Surprised to find out you're right. I assumed those device nodes would be only writable by root for this exact reason.