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Re: lack of boot-time entropy on arm64 ec2 instances



On Wed, Jan 08, 2020 at 02:48:13PM -0500, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> Option 1:
> 
> We add haveged to the arm64 EC2 AMI.  This appears to work, and is
> something we can do today.  The debian-installer has previously used
> haveged to ensure reasonable entropy during installation, so there is
> some precident for this.
> 
> Option 2:
> 
> There is a mechanism by which the VM host can pass entropy to the guest
> at boot time using the EFI_RNG protocol.  This won't require any
> additional software in our images, but it has a couple of other notable
> drawbacks:
[snip]
> I'm not aware of any other options.  Given the above, it seems that
> haveged is the only really feasible choice right now.  Does anyone
> disagree with that assessment?  Are there options I've missed?

I know of two other options:
- pollinate
- jitterentropy-rngd

pollinate downloads seeds remotely, which feels wrong - and itself may
require random numbers.  I've never tried jitterentropy.

Ross


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