[MirageOS-devel] vchan hackers wanted for mirage-entropy

[Hannes Mehnert <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Hello,

in order to move OCaml-TLS onto Xen, there is one bit missing which I
neither know in detail nor have the time to deal with.
How to get entropy into a Mirage unikernel. The startup sequence is
rather deterministic, and we don't want to require a RW object store
to keep the seed (best practises in the UNIX world).

Instead we would like to proxy /dev/urandom from dom0 into the
unikernel to seed our random number generator.

The interface is already there:
https://github.com/mirage/mirage/blob/master/types/V1.mli#L75
There is also an implementation for Xen, but this uses very weak entropy:
https://github.com/mirage/mirage-entropy/tree/master/xen


Some related work I found was virtio-rng
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Virtio_RNG) which is supposed
to work on Xen as well
(http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Virtio_On_Xen) -- but this might very likely
be overengineered for our purposes.

We (well, David) already have a state of the art random number
generator implemented (Fortuna, design by Schneier + Ferguson) here:
https://github.com/mirleft/ocaml-nocrypto/blob/master/src/fortuna.mli


If someone could give that a try, it'd speed up to get mirage-tls into
a usable state.


Thanks,

Hannes
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