random: reseed more often immediately after booting

In order to chip away at the "premature first" problem, we augment our
existing entropy accounting with more frequent reseedings at boot.

The idea is that at boot, we're getting entropy from various places, and
we're not very sure which of early boot entropy is good and which isn't.
Even when we're crediting the entropy, we're still not totally certain
that it's any good. Since boot is the one time (aside from a compromise)
that we have zero entropy, it's important that we shepherd entropy into
the crng fairly often.

At the same time, we don't want a "premature next" problem, whereby an
attacker can brute force individual bits of added entropy. In lieu of
going full-on Fortuna (for now), we can pick a simpler strategy of just
reseeding more often during the first 5 minutes after boot. This is
still bounded by the 256-bit entropy credit requirement, so we'll skip a
reseeding if we haven't reached that, but in case entropy /is/ coming
in, this ensures that it makes its way into the crng rather rapidly
during these early stages.

Ordinarily we reseed if the previous reseeding is 300 seconds old. This
commit changes things so that for the first 600 seconds of boot time, we
reseed if the previous reseeding is uptime / 2 seconds old. That means
that we'll reseed at the very least double the uptime of the previous
reseeding.

Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Reviewed-by: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions