Re: TPMs and random numbers

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 06:23:09PM -0400, Jörn Engel wrote:
> It is worse in three ways:
> - it costs performance,
> - it may create a false sense of safety and
> - it actively does harm if we credit it as entropy.
> 
> How much weight you assign to each of those is up to you.  So long as
> we don't credit any of it as entropy, I am not too adverse to mixing
> it in.  But I can equally see benefit in burning the bridges.

Well, mixing it in and using /dev/[u]random is certainly better than
blindly using the output from the RNG from the TPM directly as a
key.

I'm not sure what you mean by "burning the bridges"; what is the
alternative that you are suggesting?

						- Ted
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