linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 0/2] Add support for Qualcomm's PRNG

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Message-ID: <52556C4E.9000604@mm-sol.com>
Date:	Wed, 09 Oct 2013 17:46:38 +0300
From:	Stanimir Varbanov <svarbanov@...sol.com>
To:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>,
	Rob Herring <rob.herring@...xeda.com>,
	Pawel Moll <pawel.moll@....com>,
	Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@....com>,
	Stephen Warren <swarren@...dotorg.org>,
	Ian Campbell <ijc+devicetree@...lion.org.uk>,
	Matt Mackall <mpm@...enic.com>,
	Herbert Xu <herbert@...dor.hengli.com.au>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Rob Landley <rob@...dley.net>,
	devicetree@...r.kernel.org, linux-doc@...r.kernel.org,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
	linux-arm-msm@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] Add support for Qualcomm's PRNG

Hi Ted,

On 10/04/2013 09:10 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 07:23:50PM +0300, Stanimir Varbanov wrote:
>> I guess that it should follow NIST 800-90 recommendation, but I'm not
>> aware what DRBG mechanism is used.
>>
>> To be honest I really don't know the hardware implementation details. I
>> put PRNG abbreviation in the cover letter just because I saw that
>> defines for register offsets are prefixed with PRNG_*. I could rename
>> all occurrences of PRNG to RNG. Is that will be enough to avoid confusions?
> 
> If that's what the Qualcomm documentation uses, maybe we should stick
> with it, and add some explanatory comments.  Is there any
> documentation for this block that is public that you can either send
> me a a pointer to?

No, there is no public documentation for the block. Here is the driver
documentation which I used as a base [1].

My guess was that - if it is PRNG (got from hardware description link
above) than according to wiki [2] it is also known as a deterministic
random bit generator (DRBG). The recommendation for RNG using DRBG is
NIST 800-90.

Of course I could be wrong, so I can add a comment that this is just a
guess and we shouldn't over-reliance on this.

regards,
Stan

[1]
https://www.codeaurora.org/cgit/quic/la/kernel/msm/tree/Documentation/arm/msm/msm_rng-driver.txt?h=jb_3.2.1

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator
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