[systemd-devel] Delaying (SSH) key generation until the urandom pool is initialized

[Florian Weimer]

On 04/30/2014 02:28 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:

>> Interesting suggestion.  I just used virt-manager to create the VM.
>> I don't see any trace for "rng" or "random" in the domain XML file.
>> If it is supported, I think it should be enabled by default.
>
> I'm told that it isn't turned on by default, but you can add it to
> a VM post-install. Since it feeds VMs from the host's /dev/random
> or /dev/hwrng, there was a question mark as to whether it was right
> to enable it by default or not, and if so what kind of rate limiting
> might be wanted by default.

Ah, so it builds down to our distrust of hardware RNGs?  How annoying. 
We should be able to trust Fedora-on-Fedora (or Debian-on-Debian or 
whatever) scenarios.  But I get that in the general case, it's 
impossible to know what's on the other side of the virtio_rng side, so 
reservations remain.

-- 
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team