Re: Linux messages full of `random: get_random_u32 called from`

From: Dave Jones
Date: Sun Apr 29 2018 - 19:07:41 EST


On Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 07:02:02PM -0400, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 09:56:21AM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
>
> > Can you tell me a bit about your system? What distribution, what
> > hardware is present in your sytsem (what architecture, what
> > peripherals are attached, etc.)?
> >
> > There's a reason why we made this --- we were declaring the random
> > number pool to be fully intialized before it really was, and that was
> > a potential security concern. It's not as bad as the weakness
> > discovered by Nadia Heninger in 2012. (See https://factorable.net for
> > more details.) However, this is not one of those things where we like
> > to fool around.
> >
> > So I want to understand if this is an issue with a particular hardware
> > configuration, or whether it's just a badly designed Linux init system
> > or embedded setup, or something else. After all, you wouldn't want
> > the NSA spying on all of your network traffic, would you? :-)
>
> Why do we continue to print this stuff out when crng_init=1 though ?

answering my own question, I think.. This is a tristate, and we need it
to be >1 to be quiet, which doesn't happen until..

> [ 165.806247] random: crng init done

this point.

Dave