Canonical released Pollen/Polinate a while ago to address this problem. The idea is that each virtual machine queries a pool of entropy servers to seed it's own generator, and as log as at least one entropy server isn't compromised, you should be fine.
Random Numbers in Virtual Machines
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Random Numbers in Virtual Machines
#12> generating random PIDs for processes
Just curious, but why should PIDs be randomized? Using 'watch pidof pidof' on my laptop, PIDs seems not so randomized.
Re: Random Numbers in Virtual Machines
#13> generating random PIDs for processes Just curious, but why should PIDs be randomized? Using 'watch pidof pidof' on my laptop, PIDs seems not so randomized.
On a multiuser system there are various cases where being able to predict the PID of a process allows attack against naive code. eg. If a process uses the pid to generate a tmp file name, someone sneaks in first and makes it a link and uses that to put content into an arbitrary file they shouldn't have write access to.
Now, there is a valid contention that any code doing that is broken anyway and should just be fixed, and most code is much better about this now than 15 years ago. There is another contention that randomizing pids can help so why not.
See http://marc.info/?t=94754302700001&r=1&w=1 and http://marc.info/?t=94759485200001&r=1&w=1 for old discussion.
Re: Random Numbers in Virtual Machines
#14Entropy in VMs is hard to get, it's nice to see an "easy" way to access better system-level entropy. There are also a few utils that let you distribute entropy amongst your VMs[1], but getting everything directly from the system feels better from a security perspective. I've been forced to use rng-tools and / or rng-usleep to get enough randomness in some Ubuntu VMs in the past. It's maddening to see SSL slowdowns fo…
Over at Greenhost we use entropybroker from vanheusden to spread entropy to our VM´s. https://greenhost.net/2015/03/16/spreading-chaos-and-entropy...
Re: Random Numbers in Virtual Machines
#15It seems hwrng is mandatory otherwise /dev/random will block easily for virtio-rng.
other than the x86 instruction set there are some SOCs that embeds a hwrng directly, the one I used is Freescale iMX6 that has a FIPS-certified hwrng, which is very handy.
Re: Random Numbers in Virtual Machines
#16Entropy in VMs is hard to get, it's nice to see an "easy" way to access better system-level entropy. There are also a few utils that let you distribute entropy amongst your VMs[1], but getting everything directly from the system feels better from a security perspective. I've been forced to use rng-tools and / or rng-usleep to get enough randomness in some Ubuntu VMs in the past. It's maddening to see SSL slowdowns fo…
Over at Greenhost we use entropybroker from vanheusden to spread entropy to our VM´s. https://greenhost.net/2015/03/16/spreading-chaos-and-entropy...
this looks good comparing to the virtio-rng approach
Re: Random Numbers in Virtual Machines
#17> Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization starting version 3.5 also has exposed this feature. Anyone know what relationship that product has with oVirt ( http://www.ovirt.org ) ? I thought oVirt was kind of the upstream. So wouldn't they be adding this to oVirt as well.
The original product was called Solid ICE by a company called Qumranet. Red Hat acquired Qumranet in 2008 and as we do with all acquisitions, we started to liberate the proprietary code. It became oVirt in about 2010, and parallel to that is the downstream (but also fully open source) RHEV management product. Interesting fact: The original product was written in C# and ran only on Windows. It was translated into Java…
Thanks for explaining. That is a pretty cool history.
I am working with a bunch of C# code written for windows as well trying to make it work on Linux and went the Mono way. So far it worked pretty well (as long as no Desktop GUI forms are involved).
Re: Random Numbers in Virtual Machines
#18how many apps or software follow the random number recommendations described here?