On Tue, May 08, 2018 at 09:28:08AM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
>     Benjamin> Now, we have getrandom(), which is a great API and is
>     Benjamin> pretty much exactly what you want (again, at least in this
>     Benjamin> worldview).  IIUC Ted says that you should "just use
>     Benjamin> getrandom" for your entropy needs and not worry about
>     Benjamin> /dev/*random.  I don't know whether he takes a stance on
>     Benjamin> the GRND_RANDOM flag, though.
> 
> And I think that's fine for kadmind.
> I think there's a very real practical question about whether you want
> the KDC to fail to start if your RNG is not seeded.
> Having your KDCs be unavailable from a cold start of an environment is a
> really big thing.

I'll note that the original user report seems to have involved a
virtual machine running on Xen; my general expectation is that
bare-metal KDCs will get enough entropy from device attachment and
network traffic for long blocking to not be an issue.
Enterprise-scale deployments that use virtualized KDCs are likely to
have proper randomness pass-through devices installed, so I suspect
that the number of sites that are at any significant risk of being
affected will be a pretty small percentage.

Do you think we should raise the question on upstream's mailing
list?

-Ben

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