Bug#320838: kdm uses /dev/random, instead of /dev/urandom, and blocks on some systems with poor entropy

[Tim Small <tim@buttersideup.com>]

Christopher Martin wrote:

> On August 1, 2005 21:16, Tim Small wrote:
>  
>
> > Package: kdm
> > Version: 4:3.3.2-1
> > Severity: important
> >
> > On machines with not much entropy, kdm blocks on startup as it runs out
> > of entropy from /dev/random.  It should probably use /dev/urandom
> > instead.
> >
> > Possibly related to #294267 #240027 #298254 and maybe others.  This is
> > particularly troublesome on NFS root machines.
> >    
>
> This is fixed in KDE 3.4, so future uploads will take of this problem. In 
> the meantime, you can manually tell kdm to use /dev/urandom by 
> editing /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc (RandomDevice=/dev/urandom).
>
> Cheers,
> Christopher Martin
>  
OK - out of interest, are there any plans to fix this for future Sarge 
revs (e.g. by making this the config file default), or is that against 
policy for a bug of this severity?

One of the side-effects is that sometimes kdm gives up on /dev/random, 
and creates an unauthenticated X session - i.e. all clients can connect 
(although it does put a red warning on the log-in dialogue to reflect 
this).  I suppose this does make it vaguely security related.

Ta,

Tim.