Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Random Number Generation on Modern Systems
Stephan Müller recently pointed out that /dev/random has been showing signs of age relative to modern environments like embedded systems, solid-state drives, massively parallel systems, and virtualized systems. The problem is how to identify good sources of entropy on all systems, so that /dev/random really does produce random numbers that are equally random across all environments.
Stephan's approach, LRNG (Linux Random Number Generator), seeks to solve that problem and especially to provide proper entropy sources during boot time. He also wanted LRNG to have a lower performance effect on parallel systems and allow accelerated cryptographic primitives. Crypto primitives are simple, reliable tools that are used as building blocks of larger scale security systems. Massively parallel systems have to implement security protocols on all nodes, and having good cryptographic speed can benefit that.
Stephan gave a link to a scholarly article he'd written that described his approach [1]. Beyond the technical details, Stephan chose to release his design under a dual license – either the GPL (version number unspecified) or a more BSD-ish license that allowed closed-source binary distribution.
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