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Re: /dev/urandom and /dev/random



On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 04:45:09PM +0200, Russell Coker wrote:
> Currently the permissions settings for these devices are uncertain.
> 
> MAKEDEV makes /dev/urandom mode 444 and /dev/random either mode 444 or more 
> 666.
> 
> For devfs I plan to make them both mode 644.  From reading the latest kernel 
> source I see that writing to either of them gives the same result (so having 
> different write permissions for them makes no sense).  The boot script 
> /etc/init.d/urandom from the sysvinit package writes to /dev/urandom so root 
> write access makes sense to me (sure root can write to it anyway but I think 
> that the permissions should reflect the usage for clarity).
> 
> Also I suspect that if a malicious user ran "cat /dev/zero > /dev/random" 
> then they could poison the random number pool so I think that mode 644 is the 
> correct permissions for both devices.
> 
> Let me know if you disagree.  If there's no complaints then I'll file a bug 
> against makedev to make it do the same.

http://bugs.debian.org/81748

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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