Re: [PATCH 2/6] random: use xor for mixing

From: Alan Cox
Date: Sun Dec 09 2007 - 08:39:48 EST


> So my personal take on it is that protecting against backtracking
> attacks is mainly useful in silencing academics who like to come up
> with, well, largely academic and theoretical scenario. If it doesn't
> take much effort, sure, let's try to protect against it (and I think
> we're OK already).

That problem seems to arise here because we have an interface to add
'real' entropy to the pool but not one to add randomness to be used
solely for urandom. If we had both then the user could choose to add some
degree of randomness solely for urandom usage.

Alan
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/