I don't see that he is proposing to change the interface, just how it
gets the data it provides. Any program which depends on the actual data
values it gets from urandom is pretty broken, anyway. I think that
getting some entropy from network is a good thing, even if it's used
only in urandom, and I would like a rational discussion of checking the
random pool available when urandom is about to get random data, and
perhaps having a lower and upper bound for pool size.
That is, if there is more than Nmax random data urandom would take some,
if there was less than Nmin it wouldn't, and between them it would take
data, but less often. This would improve the urandom quality in the best
case, and protect against depleting the /dev/random entropy in low
entropy systems. Where's the downside?
There has also been a lot of discussion over the years about improving
the quality of urandom data, I don't personally think making the quality
higher constitutes "changing a 12 years old and widely used userspace
interface like /dev/urandom" either.
Sounds like a local DoS attack point to me...
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
--
