On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 8:00 PM, Yann Ylavic <ylavic....@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 6:57 PM, Eric Covener <cove...@gmail.com> wrote: >> IIUC, it takes something like 32k of /dev/random to initialize apr_random. >> >> APR_RANDOM_DEFAULT_POOLS*APR_RANDOM_DEFAULT_RESEED_SIZE*APR_RANDOM_DEFAULT_G_FOR_INSECURE >> (32*32*32) >> >> But ap_init_rng() does this with ~4000 8-byte reads of /dev/random. >> >> I am working on a platform where access to the crypto facility >> underneath /dev/random is sometimes audited. Does anyone have any >> hints about whether larger reads from /dev/random would be better >> elsewhere? Or if the startup requirement is really this high for data >> from /dev/random? > > AFAICT, /dev/urandom itself only requires 256 bits (32 bytes) of > (secret) entropy to be secure (cryptographically strong), so I don't > think more would be needed for httpd (or APR). > It seems to me that asking for more than 32 bytes of random bytes by > something like a minute is not very sound (both for the requester AND > the "others"), so IMHO we should really take that into consideration.
Addng dev@apr in case anyone with knowledge in this area is only watching there.
