Re: [PATCH 5/7] random: replace non-blocking pool with a Chacha20-based CRNG

From: Stephan Mueller
Date: Mon Jun 20 2016 - 12:43:39 EST


Am Montag, 20. Juni 2016, 11:01:47 schrieb Theodore Ts'o:

Hi Theodore,

>
> So simply doing chacha20 encryption in a tight loop in the kernel
> might not be a good proxy for what would actually happen in real life
> when someone calls getrandom(2). (Another good question to ask is
> when someone might be needing to generate millions of 256-bit session
> keys per second, when the D-H setup, even if you were using ECCDH,
> would be largely dominating the time for the connection setup anyway.)

Is speed everything we should care about? What about:

- offloading of crypto operation from the CPU

- potentially additional security features a hardware cipher may provide like
cache coloring attack resistance?

Ciao
Stephan