On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 11:14:20AM -0400, Sandy Harris wrote: > Instead, I had a compile-time option to choose a number 0-32 > for how much entropy to assume a 32-bit value from the HWRNG > contains. Default was something less than 32. I debated values > in the 24-30 range, don't recall what I chose & don't think it > Matters hugely. > > Is that a better approach than the binary choice? This patch is only affecting the initialization of the CRNG. It doesn't do anything about the entropy estimator, so it doesn't change the behavior of /dev/random, for example. In practice I doubt most people would be able to deal with a numerical dial, and I'm trying to ecourage people to use getrandom(2). I view /dev/random as a legacy interface, and for most people a CRNG is quite sufficient. For those people who are super paranoid and want a "true random number generator" (and the meaning of that is hazy) because a CRNG is Not Enough, my recommendation these days is that they get something like an open hardware RNG solution, such as ChaosKey from Altus Metrum[1]. [1] https://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/ - Ted
