[openssl-dev] Work on a new RNG for OpenSSL

[John Denker]

On 06/27/2017 06:41 PM, Peter Waltenberg wrote:

> Consider most of the worlds compute is now done on VM's where images are 
> cloned, duplicated and restarted as a matter of course. Not vastly 
> different from an embedded system where the clock powers up as 00:00 
> 1-Jan, 1970 on each image. If you can trust the OS to come up with unique 
> state each time you can rely solely on the OS RNG - well provided you 
> reseed often enough anyway, i.e. before key generation. That's also why 
> seeding a chain of PRNG's once at startup is probably not sufficient here.

That is approximately the last thing openssl should be
fussing over.  There is a set of problems there, with a
set of solutions, none of which openssl has any say over.

===>  The VM setup should provide a virtual /dev/hwrng  <===

Trying to secure a virtual machine without a virtual hwrng
(or the equivalent) is next to impossible.  There may be
workarounds, but they tend to be exceedingly locale-specific,
and teaching openssl to try to discover them would be a
tremendous waste of resources.

So stop trying to operate without /dev/hwrng already.

It reminds me of the old Smith & Dale shtick:
  -- Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do *this*.
  -- So don't do that.