svn commit: r284959 - in head: . share/man/man4 share/man/man9 sys/conf sys/dev/glxsb sys/dev/hifn sys/dev/random sys/dev/rndtest sys/dev/safe sys/dev/syscons sys/dev/ubsec sys/dev/virtio/random sy...

[Ian Lepore]

On Fri, 2015-07-24 at 07:59 +0100, Mark R V Murray wrote:
> > On 24 Jul 2015, at 02:25, John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I would like to point out that the goal of collecting large amounts
> > is starting to fall out of favor, and I happen to agree with the likes
> > of djb[1] that we don't need an infinite amount of entropy collected by
> > the system.  If the attacker can read out our RNG state, then we are
> > already screwed due to many other vulns.
> 
> I’m working on a premise of “tools, not policy”. I’d like there to be
> enough harvesting points for the box owner to get the warm fuzzies.
> If they choose to use less, fine by me.
> 
> > Many of the issues that FreeBSD sees with lack of entropy at start up
> > is more of a problem on how systems are installed and provisioned.  I
> > don't believe that we currently store any entropy from the install
> > process, yet this is one of the best places to get it, the user is
> > banging on keyboard selecting options, etc.  If an image is designed
> > to be cloned (vm images or appliance images) we need to have a
> > mechanism to ensure that before we start, we get the entropy from
> > other sources, be it a hardware RNG or the console.
> 
> Getting an initial entropy bundle for first boot is high up on my
> TODO list. :-) Patches welcome! We need the usual /entropy (or
> /var/db/entropy/… or whatever) and crucially we need /boot/entropy
> and the correct invocation in /boot/loader.conf.
> 

But keep in mind that loader(8) is optional and not used at all on some
non-x86 systems.

-- Ian