[PATCH] Require minimum random data entropy when creating LUKS (#1073679)

Chris Lumens clumens at redhat.com
Mon Sep 8 17:09:31 UTC 2014


> The wording can definitely be tweaked to make it better understandable
> to people who don't know much about encryption and entropy. Maybe
> something like "The system needs better quality of random data, you can
> improve it by typing on keyboard and moving your mouse"?

That could help.

Does doing stuff in the user and root password spoke help to increase
entropy at all?  At the least, we could use the keyboard and mouse
movements there to help.  If so, perhaps the wording could reflect this?

> [1] https://vpodzime.fedorapeople.org/entropy_graph.png

Graphs sure do make things easier to see.  Thanks.

> The only solution that comes to my mind is gathering entropy, reading
> random data and storing them aside, and then giving it back to kernel as
> an entropy pool right before we create the new LUKS format. However,
> that would be quite a lot of not so nice (probably C) code and we would
> need to figure out how much entropy each LUKS creation eats so that we
> can gather enough entropy in advance.

Ugh, no, that sounds like vastly more trouble than it's worth.  Thanks
for the explanation.  It doesn't sound like there's much that we can do
to avoid the pop up.

- Chris


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