Hi! > The rationale of this system call is to provide resiliance against > file descriptor exhaustion attacks, where the attacker consumes all > available file descriptors, forcing the use of the fallback code where > /dev/[u]random is not available. Since the fallback code is often not > well-tested, it is better to eliminate this potential failure mode > entirely. I'm not sure I understand the rationale; if someone can eat all your file descriptors, he can make you stop working. So you can just stop working when you can't open /dev/urandom, no? Fallback code is probably very bad idea to use... > The other feature provided by this new system call is the ability to > request randomness from the /dev/urandom entropy pool, but to block > until at least 128 bits of entropy has been accumulated in the > /dev/urandom entropy pool. Historically, the emphasis in the > /dev/urandom development has been to ensure that urandom pool is > initialized as quickly as possible after system boot, and preferably > before the init scripts start execution. Sounds like ioctl() for /dev/urandom for this behaviour would be nice? Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
