Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261292AbVCYEtc (ORCPT ); Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:49:32 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261291AbVCYEtb (ORCPT ); Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:49:31 -0500 Received: from parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk ([195.92.249.252]:9119 "EHLO parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261289AbVCYEtP (ORCPT ); Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:49:15 -0500 Message-ID: <42439839.7060702@pobox.com> Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:48:57 -0500 From: Jeff Garzik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040922 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: johnpol@2ka.mipt.ru CC: David McCullough , cryptoapi@lists.logix.cz, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-crypto@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton , James Morris , Herbert Xu Subject: Re: [PATCH] API for true Random Number Generators to add entropy (2.6.11) References: <20050315133644.GA25903@beast> <20050324042708.GA2806@beast> <1111665551.23532.90.camel@uganda> <4242B712.50004@pobox.com> <20050324132342.GD7115@beast> <1111671993.23532.115.camel@uganda> <42432972.5020906@pobox.com> <1111725282.23532.130.camel@uganda> In-Reply-To: <1111725282.23532.130.camel@uganda> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1122 Lines: 35 Evgeniy Polyakov wrote: > On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 15:56 -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote: >>See the earlier discussion, when data validation was -removed- from the >>original Intel RNG driver, and moved to userspace. > > I'm not arguing against userspace validation, but if data produced > _is_ cryptographically strong, why revalidate it again? You cannot prove this without validating the data in software. Otherwise, you are not handling the hardware-fault case. It is foolish to presume that hardware always works correctly. It is -very- foolish to presume this, in cryptography. > And how HIFN driver can contribute entropy? Use the current chrdev->rngd method. > You may say, that hardware can be broken and thus produces > wrong data, but if user want, it can turn it on or off. The user cannot know the data is bad unless it is constantly being validated. Jeff - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/