On Wed, 2019-10-16 at 19:25 +0300, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote:
On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 08:34:12AM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
reversible ciphers are generally frowned upon in random number generation, that's why the krng uses chacha20. In general I think we shouldn't try to code our own mixing and instead should get the krng to do it for us using whatever the algorithm du jour that the crypto guys have blessed is. That's why I proposed adding the TPM output to the krng as entropy input and then taking the output of the krng.
It is already registered as hwrng. What else?
It only contributes entropy once at start of OS.
Was the issue that it is only used as seed when the rng is init'd first? I haven't at this point gone to the internals of krng.
Basically it was similar to your xor patch except I got the kernel rng to do the mixing, so it would use the chacha20 cipher at the moment until they decide that's unsafe and change it to something else:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/1570227068.17537.4.camel@HansenPartners...
It uses add_hwgenerator_randomness() to do the mixing. It also has an unmixed source so that read of the TPM hwrng device works as expected.
James