[Bug 575669] Re: Rapid depletion of entropy pool

[agent 8131]

"independently of ASLR, it would still be nice if the kernel provided a
'strong' but fast PRNG device that one could for example use to sanitize
a harddrive at raw write speeds, something that isn't possible with
/dev/urandom for example. if such a PRNG existed it could then of course
be used for ASLR as well but ASLR itself can live with less (ditto for
the SSP cookie by the way)."

http://lwn.net/Articles/334027/

So this is really an upstream Linux kernel request or, at the outside, a
request to the kernel team to include an out-of-kernel patch.  If such a
PRNG existed it could be used for ASLR and SSP and for "(scientific)
simulations, wiping the disk, stress tests on algorithms".

The erandom device seems worthy of consideration
(http://www.billauer.co.il/frandom.html).  It seems to reach" harddrive
raw write speeds" at 155MB/s
(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1076959).  The frandom/erandom
code was rejected from the kernel in 2003
(http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0310.2/0015.html) but
that was before ASLR and SSP became the default on GNU/Linux systems.
Perhaps it's worth revisiting that debate.

-- 
Rapid depletion of entropy pool
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/575669
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