On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 10:44:31AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > - admit that the current situation actually causes problems, and has > _existing_ bugs. > > - throw it out the window, with the timeout and big BIG warning when > the problem cases trigger
The semantics many people want for secure key generation is urandom, but with a guarantee that it's seeded. getrandom()'s default behaviour at present provides that, and as a result it's used for a bunch of key generation. Changing the default (even with kernel warnings) seems like it risks people generating keys from an unseeded prng, and that seems like a bad thing? It's definitely unfortunate that getrandom() doesn't have a GRND_URANDOM flag that would make it useful for the "I want some vaguely random numbers but I don't care that much and I don't necessarily have access to /dev/urandom" case, but at the moment we have no way of distinguishing between applications that are making this call because they want the semantics of urandom but need it to be seeded (which is one of the usecases getrandom() was introduced for in the first place) and applications that are making this call because it was convenient and the kernel usually ended up generating enough entropy in the first place. Given the ambiguity, I don't see an easy way to solve for the latter without breaking the former - and that could have some *very* bad outcomes. -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org
