On Tue, Jun 06, 2017 at 01:03:19PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > The other approach is to find a way to have initialized "seed" entropy > which we can count on at every boot. The problem is that this is very > much dependent on how the bootloader works. It's easy to say "store > it in the kernel", but where the kernel is stored varies greatly from > architecture to architecture. In some cases, the kernel can stored in > ROM, where it can't be modified at all. > > It might be possible, for example, to store a cryptographic key in a > UEFI boot-services variable, where the key becomes inaccessible after > the boot-time services terminate. But you also need either a reliable > time-of-day clock, or a reliable counter which is incremented each > time the system that boots, and which can't be messed with by an > attacker, or trivially reset by a clueless user/sysadmin. FWIW, EFI has an (optional) EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL, that we currently use to seed the kernel's entropy pool. The EFI stub creates a config table with the entropy, which the kernel reads. This is re-seeded prior to kexec() to avoid the entropy being recycled. See commits: 636259880a7e7d34 ("efi: Add support for seeding the RNG from a UEFI config table") 568bc4e87033d232 (" efi/arm*/libstub: Invoke EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL to seed the UEFI RNG table") Unfortunately, I beleive that support for the protocol is currently rare in practice. Thanks, Mark.