Re:Some AMD CPU's RDRAND might not return random data after ...
by lvh on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @11:51AM
(#19850615)
Do you mean if a PRNG is available? Because the answer is obvious if RDRAND is available: you don't do that because sometimes it fails, failure is almost always catastrophic but sublte, and CSRPNGs are not a bottleneck in almost all cases.
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Re:Some AMD CPU's RDRAND might not return random data after ...
by amluto on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @12:11PM
(#19850816)
RDRAND has major benefits over any CSPRNG: there is no software-visible state that could possibly leak. With attacks like Spectre, there’s always a concern that your CSPRNG secrets could be leaked.
Re:Some AMD CPU's RDRAND might not return random data after ...
by lvh on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @03:59PM
(#19852913)
The scheme we’re discussing XORs the two at the end, so that flaw doesn’t apply. Also: empirically, “kernel leaks CSPRNG” state does not seem to be as much of a problem as “userspace is convinced it knows better than urandom/getrandom”.