Ubuntu
linux package

  1. Bug #575669
  2. Comment #1

Comment 1 for bug 575669

Revision history for this message
agent 8131 (agent-8131) wrote :

More information:

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http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/ssp.txt

The standard version of SSP uses /dev/urandom directly. When a whole system is
built with SSP this tends to consume all the kernel entropy. /dev/erandom is
reccomended [sic] for SSP to conserve kernel entropy.

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http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/entropy.txt

Frandom stands for "fast random". Erandom stands for "economical random".
They both use the arcfour algorithm

The /dev/erandom device uses the constantly changing state of frandom's pool,
in a read-only mode, for entropy. /dev/erandom consumes no entropy from
/dev/random, and is ideal for applications that want to open the device
thousands of times, such as Stack Smashing Protector.

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So it seems that if every executable is going to use the GCC SSP feature perhaps /dev/urandom is not the best source for random numbers. It could use /dev/erandom if that device was available. And it seems it would be useful to use for random data overwrites where /dev/urandom is too slow.