Re: [MirageOS-devel] Update on entropy

[david <unitedbiscuits@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 4:49 PM, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 27 Mar 2015, at 15:16, Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>> And the question I am raising is: Are there objections to this? Did
>>> anyone want to code something that requires direct access to entropy
>>> sources (i.e. another RNG)? Did anyone want to make a separate entropy
>>> provider?
>>
>> I think that's a good idea. We should still keep the modular approach of 
>> MirageOS (ie. having separate librarie(s) to deal with entropy) but I'm fine 
>> to remove the ENTROPY signature for V1 and V1_LWT as it doesn't bring much 
>> (apart from confusion it appears).

Yes, absolutely. I did not actually want to inline various libraries
into one; rather, I'm arguing that we introduced a bit of unintended
generality by adding a public interface ahead of actual need, and that
we can simplify the system by backing out a bit.

> I'm also fine with this approach.  Just one thing that would be good
> to define would be which our "singleton" devices are.  In the case of
> entropy, it's extremely unlikely that you would want to have a
> non-shared mixer, so perhaps we should enforce that explicitly in the
> Mirage config eDSL...
>
> It would also be good to port the TCP/IP stack to using nocrypto at
> the same time, to give it the IP ID and TCP ISN random sources, and
> to have more than one consumer outside of the TLS stack.  This is a
> very localised patch -- it currently uses the Random module directly.

This follows from equipping Nocrypto with the existing Mirage RANDOM
signature (almost trivial). I think no further changes to anything
else are needed, as TCP is already functorized over RANDOM. Thomas'
objection to GMP still applies, though, but there would be no
coupling.

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