From: Daniel Borkmann <redacted>
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 14:01:38 +0200

From: Hannes Frederic Sowa <redacted>

Currently, we have a 3-stage seeding process in prandom():

Phase 1 is from the early actual initialization of prandom()
subsystem which happens during core_initcall() and remains
most likely until the beginning of late_initcall() phase.
Here, the system might not have enough entropy available
for seeding with strong randomness from the random driver.
That means, we currently have a 32bit weak LCG() seeding
the PRNG status register 1 and mixing that successively
into the other 3 registers just to get it up and running.

Phase 2 starts with late_initcall() phase resp. when the
random driver has initialized its non-blocking pool with
enough entropy. At that time, we throw away *all* inner
state from its 4 registers and do a full reseed with strong
randomness.

Phase 3 starts right after that and does a periodic reseed
with random slack of status register 1 by a strong random
source again.

A problem in phase 1 is that during bootup data structures
can be initialized, e.g. on module load time, and thus access
a weakly seeded prandom and are never changed for the rest
of their live-time, thus carrying along the results from a
week seed. Lets make sure that current but also future users
access a possibly better early seeded prandom.

This patch therefore improves phase 1 by trying to make it
more 'unpredictable' through mixing in seed from a possible
hardware source. Now, the mix-in xors inner state with the
outcome of either of the two functions arch_get_random_{,seed}_int(),
preferably arch_get_random_seed_int() as it likely represents
a non-deterministic random bit generator in hw rather than
a cryptographically secure PRNG in hw. However, not all might
have the first one, so we use the PRNG as a fallback if
available. As we xor the seed into the current state, the
worst case would be that a hardware source could be unverifiable
compromised or backdoored. In that case nevertheless it
would be as good as our original early seeding function
prandom_seed_very_weak() since we mix through xor which is
entropy preserving.

Joint work with Daniel Borkmann.

Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Hannes Frederic Sowa <redacted>

Looks great, applied, thanks everyone.