taskThe GNU Hurd - Tasks: task #5130, random translator

 
 

task #5130: random translator

Submitter:  Alfred M. Szmidt <ams>
Submitted:  Sun 08 Jan 2006 09:33:09 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  The GNU Hurd Should Start On:  Sat 07 Jan 2006 11:00:00 PM UTC
Should be Finished on:  Sat 07 Jan 2006 11:00:00 PM UTC Priority:  * 5 - Normal
Status:  In Progress Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  sonicmctails Percent Complete:  0%
Open/Closed:  Open Planned Release:  None
Effort:  0.00
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<http://hurd.gnufans.org/bin/view/Hurd/RandomDevice>
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2007-01/msg00047.html>

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Fri 15 Jun 2007 07:48:33 AM UTC, comment #2: 

My opinion is that the mashing should happen in user space, because user space may also want to provide other sources of entropy, which also needs mashing.

Samuel Thibault <sthibaul>
Group administrator
Fri 15 Jun 2007 05:03:01 AM UTC, comment #1: 

I figure this is a good place to post. For anyone following IRC, I've been fighting to get a working entropy device in the kernel, and finally managed to get some entropy going (not much, but its only reading one source as of writing, I'll fix that tommorow). As it stands, using storeio with the entropy device creates a perfectly usable /dev/random, but its going to likely need a custom translator to create /dev/urandom.

I'm also not sure if I should entropy just dump raw bits, and let the translator mash it up, or have it happen in the kernel itself. I'm leaning towards doing the actual mashing within the kernel, and have an option to turn that on and off. Anyone have any opinions on the subject or not.

I'm also trying to figure out how to handle entropy collection for urandom. What needed is the buffer to change constantly even if new seed data can't be gathered, which is what Linux does, and I suggest we simply use the same agrothim as them since we don't need to prove ours is then secure.

Michael Casadevall <sonicmctails>
Group Member
Sun 08 Jan 2006 09:33:09 PM UTC, original submission:  

We need a good random translator, someone (Marcus?) wrote on many moons ago, but I don't know the status of that.  For proper entropy gathering to work, we need to modify Mach to provide it to the translator, someone once again worked on this (Daniel Wagner?).

So what is needed is more or less digging up those patches, cleaning them up, and checking that the entropy source is `secure'.  Checking that the entropy is good requires someone with a mathematically inclined background, but I think there are programs that can test (not suire how well) if the entroy is `good enough', or just something that is simply duplicated on another machine.


This should be a relativley easy task to do, the problem is checking how good the entropy that is gathered by GNU Mach.

Alfred M. Szmidt <ams>

 

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    2007-09-28 tschwinge StatusNone In Progress
        Assigned toNone sonicmctails
    2007-01-17 tschwinge Wiki-like text discussion box <http://hurd.gnufans.org/bin/view/Hurd/RandomDevice> <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2007-01/msg00047.html>
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