Am Mon, 04 Aug 2014 13:30:49 +0000 schrieb Patrick Schleizer <[email protected]>:
> David Goulet: > > Their big issue is the Ubuntu Cloud Image for which they rely on > > https://launchpad.net/pollinate, TL;DR; it fetches random bytes over > > HTTPS to seed /dev/random. (They do pin the certificate in the > > client which is less crazy :). > > > > See: > > http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/02/random-seeds-in-ubuntu-1404-lts-cloud.html > > > > To be honest, I don't have a good way of fixing this issue. Feeding > > the urandom-seed with the date might be better than nothing but > > again I think that if a NTP correction occurs before seeding it, an > > attacker could end up knowing the seed if the NTP server or the > > link is malicious. > > > > Is it crazy to think that Tails could provide a "seeding server" > > and use pollinate? > > I found an interesting comment about pollinate. [1] > > > Sooo, let me get this right. Your VM has no good random seed to > > start > from. To deal with that you make an HTTPS request to some server on > the internet. That HTTPS connection requires a session key, which you > have to generate from your random source that, well..., is not > well-seeded at that point. Hence all the encryption of that seed is > pretty much pointless. > > Discussion is also interesting. [1] > > What do you think? Is the https session key argument a good one > against pollinate? At least in the VM/Cloud case it's a very strange/suspicious solution. I think the hypervisor/cloud-infrastructure should provide a (initial) randomness source. Since you must fully trust it anyway. Regarding your question one could argue that it's better than nothing since you have a single https-handshake so a statistical attack is probably harder. But i think for Tails is a central randomness anyway a no-go even if it would improve the entropy situation. > > [1] > https://plus.google.com/wm/1/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/K22yyHRc6hn > > Cheers, > Patrick > _______________________________________________ > Tails-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-dev > To unsubscribe from this list, send an empty email to > [email protected].
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