Proposed F19 Feature: Virtio RNG

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 2:19 AM, Paul Wouters <paul at nohats.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Feb 2013, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>
>> other than providing other sources of entropy, and long-term this is
>> going to be fixed once everyone's moved to Ivy Bridge and has an
>> unprivileged instruction to hand out entropy.
>
> uhm I know intel really wants us to use it directly and trust them, but
> we're going to run it through the kernel right? And just expose it via
> /dev/random to userland yes?
... and applications will call the best-matching RNG function from a
reputable crypto library instead of reading /dev/anything or using an
architecture-specific instruction directly, hopefully.

(That said, if you don't trust Intel to implement rdrand properly, do
you trust them not to specially recognize and "mis-execute" code
implementing the kernel /dev/random entropy pool update or other
similarly critical code?  There is even that handy microcode update
mechanism that allows a hypothetical malicious Intel to adapt to
kernel code changes.)
    Mirek