entropy at stage 1

From: Jorge Almeida <jjalmeida_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2017 09:20:57 -0700

This is what I do at stage 1, regarding entropy gathering:

- start haveged service soon
- in background,
        - read 512 bytes from /dev/random and write them to /dev/urandom
        - write something to a pipe entropy_pipe

-meanwhile, do other stuff (filesystem checking, etc)

-in background,
         -read from entropy_pipe (blocks until ready)
         - start services that require /dev/urandom in a sane state

To my experience (common 1 user workstations) startup is very fast (1
or 2 secs).

Is this a terrible idea? Note that I'm not keeping an entropy seed
from shutdown into startup.

I use haveged just for accelerating initial entropy gathering,
otherwise everything that needs entropy uses /dev/urandom.

(Complete list of documentation found in the internet about haveged
suitability for this purpose, plus info about copying from /dev/random
to /dev/urandom:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/File:Tumbleweed.gif )


Comments?

Thanks

Jorge Almeida
Received on Tue Sep 26 2017 - 16:20:57 UTC

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