svn commit: r274739 - head/sys/mips/conf

[Mark R V Murray]

> On 21 Nov 2014, at 15:16, Ian Lepore <ian at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
>> If you can demonstrate a usable system w/o much modifications that
>> runs w/ the dummy interface, or no boot random, that I'll drop my
>> suggestion...  I'll try removing random tomorrow and see what breaks...
>> 
> 
> If your point is that after the recent commits you can no longer do
> these things, then I guess that's kind of hard to argue with given that
> some of us have been trying to say for a couple years that if 
> /dev/random starts blocking to wait for entropy at startup, existing
> *functional* small systems will stop working.

As a fair bit of the security subsystem depends on working /dev/random,
this is true.

HOWEVER - I’m most willing to entertain ideas on how to get a general
config going that disables anything that is /dev/random-dependant.

Asking the SO to break sshd(8) isn’t going to work, but enabling
(say) telnet and/or rsh in the !random(4) case could be a way to do
it.

> Before those changes everything worked fine on the 90mhz 64MB arm
> systems we build products around, which have no more than a few bits of
> entropy available during the boot process, and which (I'll say it again
> even though nobody has ever paid any attention to it) don't actually
> need any entropy to come up and do what it is they are designed to do.
> 
> They don't use https (a few of them don't even have network
> connections).  They use ssh for its convenience (it's better than
> telnet), but NOT for security.  (And really, whether that makes sense to
> you or not, "the system must be secure" is not your decision to make.)

Why not just use rsh? If the security overhead is onerous, don’t use it.

> I haven't tested a recent -current on those small systems, but we've
> already resigned ourselves to sticking with 8.x for those older boards
> just because the tide of bloat (both code and policy) is too much to
> swim against.

Yet you use ssh?

M
-- 
Mark R V Murray