Re: [PATCH v43 01/15] Linux Random Number Generator

Jason,
have you previously produced a list of reasoned concerns with this
patchset and direction?

This specific email is not really useful to me to understand the
concerns as it does not contain actionable suggestion or critique.

I personally find the direction fine, and with my distribution hat on I
can say that FIPS is essential for us and any design must include an
option to be FIPS certifiable.

As NIST keeps improving their testing capabilities and rigorous
cryptographic design of the CSPRNGs as well as entropy sources the
kernel must also adapt.

Stephan is providing a path forward, and I haven't seen any other
proposal, let alone code, that provide improvements in this area.
I am pretty sure the design can be improved if there is detailed and
actionable feedback on what to change.

I hope the path forward can be one of collaboration rather then mere
opposition.

HTH,
Simo.

On Sun, 2021-11-21 at 23:42 +0100, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:

Hi Stephan,

You've posted it again, and yet I still believe this is not the
correct design or direction. I do not think the explicit goal of
extended configurability ("flexibility") or the explicit goal of being
FIPS compatible represent good directions, and I think this introduces
new problems rather than solving any existing ones. While there are
ways the current RNG could or even should be improved -- or rewritten
-- this approach is still not that, no matter how many times you post
it. It is almost as though you hope this somehow gets accepted through
a general apathy that might develop by the 1000th revision, when
cranks like me and others no longer have the motivation to keep
responding with the same thing. But here we are again.

My own experience pushing something that didn't have substantial
enough buy-in from existing maintainers (the Zinc crypto library)
ultimately led me to stop pushing in order to not alienate folks, step
back, and listen a bit. Eventually somebody reached out to work with
me (Ard) and we submitted a good compromise collaboration that we all
generally felt better about. In this case, your cryptographic design
tastes are sufficiently divergent from mine that I'm not sure how far
such a thing would go, but it also seems to me that continually
pushing the same thing over and over isn't winning you any points here
either. Submission by attrition is not an outcome anybody should want.

Sorry to be so blunt. It's just that my, "I don't like this" is the
same as it was the last time, and I'm not aware of anything
significant in that area changing this time.

Jason

-- 
Simo Sorce
RHEL Crypto Team
Red Hat, Inc