While I agree with what you’re saying, I think it should be pointed out that the author clearly states that it’s a simplistic model and even mentions the multiple pools briefly (though I’m unsure if that was add post-comment, as author is on hn also).

No, the page hasn‘t been changed in quite some time. The last real change was the 4.8 change, long after 4.8 was out.

Does increasing the rate of external entropy risk swamping the system generated entropy? I.e. if the external source is compromised could this also compromise urandom such that the results could become predictable?

No! This is the thing everyone needs to understand: once you have achieved "entropy" with a modern CSPRNG (including T'so's), you never lose that property. Think of the RNG like a stream cipher like AES-CTR. How much data do you have to encrypt with AES-CTR to "lose" or "leak" the underlying AES key?

Here I have to disagree (in the small) essentially the problem of 'breaking' a RNG is discovering that hidden state (the entropy pool) behind the CSPRNG - if you believe that the NSA, and their competitors, don't each have a team of PhDs pouring over the linux random code looking for ways to do that you're dreaming. After all if you know its state you can predict the keys it will make in the future

My intuition is that every operation we do (start TCP connections, generate keys, backoff after a failed login, ....) reveals a tiny fraction of a bit about that hidden state, web assembly calling random over and over again probably reveals much much more, over time it builds up.

(anyone want to guess if there's a quantum computer attack here, it kind of looks like the sort of problem where there might be)

So I think that with a sophisticated enough attacker entropy does degrade, the trick is to replace that entropy at a faster rate that the rate at which you guess the worst case attacker might be able to guess.

For most people it probably doesn't matter, you're exposing so little state over time you're likely effectively as safe as the parent poster claims, it kind of depends on whether, in this age when we know that nation state actors are watching every packet that passes thru their hands, watching every thing we're doing online, are you interesting enough for them to spend the time and effort? does the US/5Is think you're not a Trump supporter? are the Chinese interested in your trade secrets? whi knows what the Russians think

As I mentioned above using /dev/urandom doesn't have a mechanism you can use to signal this guess about how much entropy it needs over time to be safe, prior to 4.8 we used to have a mechanism that said "give it some more entropy every N seconds, 60 by default" but that's now broken

(provided here a python applet that periodically drains a little bit of /dev/random entropy if it has plenty available to stir the input pool that /dev/urandom uses for its entropy source)

The point is that the LRNG isn't unknowable, and if the NSA can break it, they can break a lot of other stuff. The LRNG isn't built on AES-CTR (but it just as easily could have been); it's (last I checked) essentially a sort of PRF built on SHA1. All the machinations in the LRNG with multiple pools and the elaborate mixing function and the counters are just plumbing around what is essentially a keystream generated from SHA1 "keyed" by "entropy". The "entropy updates" the kernel rekey that PRF, not because the PRF is weakening but because a vulnerability (orthogonal to the LRNG) could expose kernel memory and thus the LRNG's state, and the updates allow it to recover from that kind of compromise.

That's a lot of words because the LRNG is overly complicated. But let's make it clearer: what you're saying about every TCP sequence number "revealing" part of the "hidden state" is exactly equivalent to the argument that every byte of AES-CTR ciphertext is revealing the hidden AES key. If that were the case, AES would be grievously broken.

If you don't believe that AES-CTR and the LRNG are roughly equivalent, try this thought experiment: retain the initialization functionality from the current LRNG --- building a pool of mixed and hashed unpredictable data from kernel events --- and scrap the rest of the LRNG, replacing it with... AES-CTR, using a hash of the entropy pool as its key. Reads from random/urandom (or kernel random reads, as with your sequence numbers) just tap bytes from the AES-CTR keystream. Is every TCP sequence number still revealing a little bit of the RNG state?

The Python script seems entirely silly to me; once the first read from /dev/random succeeds, you're guaranteed to have a fully initialized LRNG, and every subsequent read from urandom will be unpredictable and indistinguishable from random. Nothing is served by updating the LRNG after that point.

I think you misunderstand my point, we're continually revealing tiny fractions of a bit of the internal state = hopefully really tiny fractions, an AES stream doesn't reveal the key, but other places reveal the direct output of the random number generator (TCP sessions are a great example, various nonces), all those tiny fractions can add up, but provided we add entropy faster than we expose all those little bits we're probably OK

If the output of the random number generator used in tcp sessions is aes-ctr keyed by hash of entropy pool and aes does not reveal the key, then the output of the random number generator used in tcp sessions does not reveal the entropy pool.

What you wrote is magical thinking.

You have to be root to add entropy to /dev/*random so you have to trust root - mind you many distros (ubuntu for example) use the CPU's RNG to provide external entropy by default, they trust Intel, you have to decide if you do too.

However kernel entropy is real, adding more entropy to the entropy pool is always is always adding more entropy. If the pool had 1000 bits in it and you add 5 bits from the kernel and a fake 1000 bits from a bogus external source it still has 1005 bits of entropy (however /dev/random thinks it will be able to extract 2005 bits)

We actually encourage our customers who are particularly paranoid to lie to the kernel about the quality of the entropy our RNG generates - saying the entropy quality is lower than it really is causes more good quality data to be mixed into the kernel pool (of course the defaults don't do this)

The kernel pools are actually quite small (4k bits) so there's a real practical limit to how much you can play this sort of game

BTW - a tiny bit of python to keep /dev/urandom fed post 4.8 - useful if you have a hardware RNG (either an external one or the one in your CPU):

  #! /usr/bin/python
  #
  #       OneRNG /dev/urandom tickler
  #       (C) Copyright Paul Campbell Moonbase Otago 2018
  #       Released under a GPL 3.0 license
  #
  import time

  with open("/dev/random", 'rb') as r:
          while True:
                  with 
  open("/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail", 'r') as e:  
                          iv = e.read()
                          print(iv)
                          if iv > 1500:
                                  x= r.read(1000)
                          e.close()
                  time.sleep(1)

GPL 3.0 for a few obvious lines seems to be really an unfitting license.

Non-licensed English language version, containing the same information:

Once per second, read /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail and if the resulting number is more than 1500 perform a read of 1000 bytes from /dev/random.

(this is more of a tangential licensing PSA, since we're on the subject)

Not licensing something is, ironically, restrictive. If you want to release to public domain (or equivalent), you have to explicitly mention that. E.g. by licensing under CC0.

Otherwise, default copyright and "all rights reserved" applies.

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...

(But, IMO, nothing wrong with publicizing use of GPL 3! :) thanks either way to both)

I think GP is getting at something else. As the length/complexity of the code goes to zero, the copyright and "all rights reserved" vanishes; this is well established, or else we'd all have to license "Hello world" examples from Kernighan and Ritchie's book.

If someone writes the same one-sentence pseudocode as GP in a book or blogpost, nobody could reasonably claim that an implementation would fall under the copyright of that book. And I think you'd be very hard pressed to argue it's copyrightable just because someone typed it out into real code.

sorry, just grabbed my standard disclaimer, can't release code without copyrighting it first. As others have pointed out it's trivial to reimplement in the language of your choice go for it

Ruby version:

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby

  source = File.open('/dev/random', 'rb')

  loop do
    source.read(1000) unless File.read('/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail').to_i < 1500
    sleep 1
  end

Do you have a gist or similar link for this code? Copy & paste doesn't work due to indentation issues.

What problem does this solve?

entropy_avail returns bits of entropy to a maximum of 4096(?), but this reads 1000 bytes. Why check if it's greater than 1500 if you're going to use it all anyway? Am I missing something here?

remember that this is for people with external entropy sources, the kernel entropy will refill fast. 1500 is more a measure of "is /dev/random busy at the moment" if it is then it's pulling data from from the external entropy source and /dev/urandom is essentially already being fed with more entropy

The missing mechanism we're trying to emulate used to essentially read N bytes (whatever user space happened to want at the time) every M seconds our experience has been that that can be way more than 1000 bytes, but reduce it if you like