News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on OpenSSH taking minutes to become available, booting takes half an hour (2018). Parent comment

Re:OpenSSH taking minutes to become available, booting takes... by nitrogen on Thursday July 18, 2019 @12:29AM (#20466710)
This is unlikely, but wouldn't it be conceivable that a malicious hardware "RNG" that lives in the CPU and has access to the internal state of the OS RNG (and knows common OS algorithms) could always supply the worst possible value to counteract whatever is in the pool?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:OpenSSH taking minutes to become available, booting takes... by ori_b on Thursday July 18, 2019 @01:34AM (#20467016)
Yeah, but you don't need to use rdrand in that scenario -- the cpu could also just tamper with the pool at will, regardless of the RDRAND instruction.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:OpenSSH taking minutes to become available, booting takes... by lifthrasiir on Thursday July 18, 2019 @03:57AM (#20467739)
djb has noted that RDRAND is a particularly attractable means to exfiltration back in 2014 [1]. So it is not simply irrelevant.

[1] https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html

[ Parent | on HN ]