[kata-dev] /dev/urandom or /dev/random
Marco Vedovati
mvedovati at suse.com
Tue Sep 25 10:12:56 UTC 2018
On Mon, 2018-09-24 at 22:20 +0000, Boeuf, Sebastien wrote:
> The long term solution seems to rely on /dev/urandom device as this
> one will not block if no entropy is ready yet. But from what we can
> read online, it seems that some people have some security concerns
> about it. I'd like to understand if those worries are valid or not,
> and if we should keep thinking about another way to fix this issue.
Hi, here's an extract of `man 7 random`:
Choice of random source
Unless you are doing long-term key generation (and most likely not even then), you probably shouldn't be
reading from the /dev/random device or employing getrandom(2) with the GRND_RANDOM flag. Instead, either
read from the /dev/urandom device or employ getrandom(2) without the GRND_RANDOM flag. The cryptographic
algorithms used for the urandom source are quite conservative, and so should be sufficient for all purposes.
In my view, given the ephemeral aspect of containers, /dev/urandom
should be fine most of the time. As an option, user should be left the
possibility to select /dev/random if that is needed for his specific
application.
BTW, it may be worth investigating on what is the state of the art
solution chosen in virtualization systems with a high VM count.
Marco
> Thanks,
> Sebastien
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