linux-kernel - Re: kernel projects for students

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Date:   Mon, 22 Mar 2021 17:16:08 -0400
From:   Jeffrey Walton <noloader@...il.com>
To:     Muni Sekhar <munisekharrms@...il.com>
Cc:     kernelnewbies <kernelnewbies@...nelnewbies.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: kernel projects for students

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 11:37 AM Muni Sekhar <munisekharrms@...il.com> wrote:
>
> What are some good Linux projects in kernel space for final year
> computer.science engineering students?
> Could someone help and share your ideas on this please.

Hedging deployed cryptography.

Hedging can be used to keep the state of a machine unique and the
rng's in good working order to minimize/eliminate the risk associated
with low entropy devices and virtual machine resets.

You would hook the network stack and look for the other party's random
secret, like ClientHello.random in SSL/TLS [RFC 5246]. When the data
arrives you add it to the machine's entropy pools.

In addition to SSL/TLS, you also have SSH and IPsec to grab another
party's entropy. I am sure there are others, but SSH, SSL/TLS and
IPsec are the ones I would focus on.

Also see "When Virtual is Harder than Real: Resource Allocation
Challenges in Virtual Machine Based IT Environments,"
http://static.usenix.org/event/hotos05/final_papers/full_papers/garfinkel/garfinkel.pdf
; and "When Good Randomness Goes Bad: Virtual Machine Reset
Vulnerabilities and Hedging Deployed Cryptography,"
http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/10/pdf/15.pdf .

Jeff