On Sun, 2016-11-20 at 10:14 +0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: > Hello Nikos, > > > > > > Obviously, no one knows of such a vulnerability, and I'm fairly > > > confident that there won't be such a vulnerability across the > > > different ways we've used to generate the urandom source --- but > > > some > > > people are professional paranoids, and would argue that we > > > shouldn't > > > make bulk output of the CSPRNG available for no good reason, just > > > in > > > case. > > > > The above is certainly accurate, however, I think that such a > > discussion or text, when reflected to a man-page is going to cause > > problems. The audience of a man-page are not crypto people, and > > seeing such text would create confusion rather than clarify how > > these > > devices/apis should be used. The *if* part is not put into a > > perspective, suggesting that such an *if* is possible. However, if > > one clarifies, i.e., in that case, your TLS or SSH connection is > > most > > likely broken as well, and not because of any attack on > > /dev/urandom, > > then one can see that we are heading towards a theoretical > > discussion. > > > > My suggestion, on that particular text would be to remove it, but > > make it explicit somewhere in the text that all the assurances for > > the devices depend on the crypto primitives, rather than describing > > risks that may arise on particular usage patterns *if* primitives > > are > > broken. > > Thanks. This makes sense to me. Following your suggestion, > I plan to apply the patch below. Does it seem okay to you? Looks fine to me. regards, Nikos -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
