Hi Stephan,

That is set as "optional but highly recommended" in the FIPS doc, plus the fact 
that we do not have a requirement to have a FIP-approved RNG in our case. 
Although FIPS might impose higher and stronger requirements on the source of 
entropy, but not passing those tests does not mean the source of entropy is of 
bad quality. As I mentioned earlier, we just need to evaluate the amount of 
entropy it provides correctly and use it accordingly. If we are dealing with a 
chip which has a HW RNG, we expect extremely high entropy close to full from 
our source, but this patch is for chips which do not have a dedicated HW RNG in 
place to improve the quality of random number generation on the platform.

Thanks,
Miaoqing

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephan Mueller [mailto:smuel...@chronox.de] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2016 3:27 PM
To: Pan, Miaoqing <miaoq...@qti.qualcomm.com>
Cc: Herbert Xu <herb...@gondor.apana.org.au>; Matt Mackall <m...@selenic.com>; 
miaoq...@codeaurora.org; Valo, Kalle <kv...@qca.qualcomm.com>; 
linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org; ath9k-devel <ath9k-de...@qca.qualcomm.com>; 
linux-cry...@vger.kernel.org; ja...@lakedaemon.net; Sepehrdad, Pouyan 
<pouy...@qti.qualcomm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] ath9k: disable RNG by default

Am Mittwoch, 10. August 2016, 07:15:49 CEST schrieb Pan, Miaoqing:

Hi Miaoqing,

> Hi Stephan,
> 
> NIST SP 800-22-rev1a and NIST SP 800-90B are used together to evaluate 
> the amount of min entropy the source provides, and not to decide if 
> the source has passed the tests or failed. See
> 
> https://github.com/usnistgov/SP800-90B_EntropyAssessment
> 
> The goal is often to make sure the input entropy is more than the 
> entropy we expect from the output.

You are correct on the SP800-90B tests (hence I did not refer to them for the 
binary decision). Yet, SP800-22 with the associated tool delivers a binary 
decision.

Ciao
Stephan
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