On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 2:19 AM, Paul Wouters <paul@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 1 Feb 2013, Matthew Garrett wrote: > >> other than providing other sources of entropy, and long-term this is >> going to be fixed once everyone's moved to Ivy Bridge and has an >> unprivileged instruction to hand out entropy. > > uhm I know intel really wants us to use it directly and trust them, but > we're going to run it through the kernel right? And just expose it via > /dev/random to userland yes? ... and applications will call the best-matching RNG function from a reputable crypto library instead of reading /dev/anything or using an architecture-specific instruction directly, hopefully. (That said, if you don't trust Intel to implement rdrand properly, do you trust them not to specially recognize and "mis-execute" code implementing the kernel /dev/random entropy pool update or other similarly critical code? There is even that handy microcode update mechanism that allows a hypothetical malicious Intel to adapt to kernel code changes.) Mirek -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel