linux-kernel - Re: Linux messages full of `random: get_random

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Date:   Sun, 29 Apr 2018 19:07:29 -0400
From:   Dave Jones <davej@...emonkey.org.uk>
To:     "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>,
        Paul Menzel <pmenzel+linux-random-number@...gen.mpg.de>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Linux messages full of `random: get_random_u32 called from`

On Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 07:02:02PM -0400, Dave Jones wrote:
 > On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 09:56:21AM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
 > 
 >  > Can you tell me a bit about your system?  What distribution, what
 >  > hardware is present in your sytsem (what architecture, what
 >  > peripherals are attached, etc.)?
 >  > 
 >  > There's a reason why we made this --- we were declaring the random
 >  > number pool to be fully intialized before it really was, and that was
 >  > a potential security concern.  It's not as bad as the weakness
 >  > discovered by Nadia Heninger in 2012.  (See https://factorable.net for
 >  > more details.)  However, this is not one of those things where we like
 >  > to fool around.
 >  > 
 >  > So I want to understand if this is an issue with a particular hardware
 >  > configuration, or whether it's just a badly designed Linux init system
 >  > or embedded setup, or something else.  After all, you wouldn't want
 >  > the NSA spying on all of your network traffic, would you?  :-)
 > 
 > Why do we continue to print this stuff out when crng_init=1 though ?

answering my own question, I think.. This is a tristate, and we need it
to be >1 to be quiet, which doesn't happen until..

 > [  165.806247] random: crng init done

this point.

	Dave