Thanks to a badly-written mngt script - we've rencently noticed a freshly generated ssh-key on a new AWS instances to be indentical to one seen a few months prior.
Careful analysis of some other logs showed that we've had similar clashes on another script just after startup generating a very short x509 CSR. It happens quite rarely though. But still. I am surmising that perhaps the (micro-T) images do not have that much entropy on startup. So I am wondering how to best make our images 'more random' -- and want to avoid the linux/openstack suggestion[1] of doing this through the boot-params [2] (as in our case it is the operator of the machine we're protecting/guarding against accusations/temptations). Now we happen to have very easy access to blocks of 1024bits of randomness from a remote server in already nicely PKI signed packages (as it is needed later for something else). Is it safe to simply *add* those with: set -1 # fetch randomness & check signature .. snipped... # Seed Software random generator # cat rnd > /dev/random # Activate software random generator as an additional source sysctl kern.random.sys.harvest.swi=1 Or does this cause a loss/reset of all entropy gathered by the hardware sofar ? Or is there a cleaner way to add a additional seed as a one-off with disturbing as little as possible (in the few seconds just after the network is brought up). Thanks, Dw. FWIIW: this is the output of sysctl kern.random. kern.random.yarrow.gengateinterval: 10 kern.random.yarrow.bins: 10 kern.random.yarrow.fastthresh: 192 kern.random.yarrow.slowthresh: 256 kern.random.yarrow.slowoverthresh: 2 kern.random.sys.seeded: 1 kern.random.sys.harvest.ethernet: 1 kern.random.sys.harvest.point_to_point: 1 kern.random.sys.harvest.interrupt: 1 kern.random.sys.harvest.swi: 0 1: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2012/10/entropy-or-lack-thereof-in-openstack.html 2: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/14550/ _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"