[Toybox] You've seen the /dev/random shenanigans, right?

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Tue Sep 19 04:10:36 PDT 2023


Looks like the kernel devs rewrote stuff in 2022 to make it more dependent on
systemd, and now writing to /dev/random not only doesn't credit entropy (so it
still blocks) but has an arbitrary delay about even mixing the data in.

https://lwn.net/Articles/889452/

Apparently busybox copied code from systemd to do the same thing via a different
API as if that's an improvement:

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2022-April/089559.html

And I just noticed because somebody mentioned Android involvement. (I still try
to check that mailing list twice/month for anything of obvious interest.)

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2023-September/090471.html

Might not matter on systems with a hardware random number generator with a
kernel driver hooked up to it, but it breaks the embedded world. (Then again the
embedded linux projects I've seen recently have been reverting _back_ to the 2.6
kernel...)

I'm trying to figure out if I should add something like an "rngcredit" command
to call the gratuitous ioctl to supply data you used to be able to write into
proc before they made /dev/random world writeable and decided doing so was a
threat vector but that it should still totally allow it...

Rob
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