[Cialug] Get Random in VMware

[Todd Walton]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 1:54 PM, Zachary Kotlarek <zach at kotlarek.com> wrote:

> CPU jitter (which is what HAVEGE uses) is the most commonly available
> source; it’s available on any system with access to high-resolution timers,
> which is available on most modern CPUs including VMs. Some VM environments
> will pass through access to the host’s entropy source, but if you don’t
> control the host (or it doesn’t have a source that’s support for pass
> through) that may not be available.
>
> Starting in kernel 4.2 there’s the jitterentropy_rng module (config name:
> CRYPTO_JITTERENTROPY) based on the conceptually similar work from
> http://www.chronox.de/jent.html. It requires a userland daemon to manage
> the entropy estimate (which is important if you want to consume from
> /dev/random at speed) but actual entropy generation is in-kernel and
> produces something like 10 KBps on mid-range hardware.
>

So possibilities are:

* a CPU instruction... uh... maybe... Okay, I don't know how to do that.
I'm a lowly sysadmin practicing the no-dev lifestyle.
* haveged, which sounds promising. I'd have to compile myself, it's not in
the standard repo.
* curl random.org and scrape the output =)
* upgrade to -- holy crap are we up to 4.2 already? I'm still on 2.6!

Thanks all. Despite my jocularity, this gives me a lot of help.

--
Todd