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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is a silly question, but why should RNG even be part of the kernel in the first place? It's convenient having it in a device file, but why couldn't that be provided by some userspace program or daemon?

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Two good reasons:

1. The kernel has access to unpredictable events that make good key fodder for the CSPRNG itself, which would be more annoying and less efficient to percolate into userland.

2. The kernel can assure all the processes on the device that they're getting random bits from a known source of unpredictable bits, and refuse to deliver those bits if its state hasn't been sufficiently populated; this has been a recurring source of systems vulnerabilities in programs with userland CSPRNGs.

To that, add the convenience factor of always knowing how to get random bits and not having to set up userland dependencies and ensure they're started in the right order &c.

You should generally use your kernel's CSPRNG in preference to other ones, and break that rule of thumb only if you know exactly what you're doing.

1. The kernel has much more access to sources of indeterminism than a userspace application does. Things like disk seeks, packet jitter, asynchronous interrupts, etc. provide lots of "true" entropy to work with. Userspace programs, on the other hand, have very deterministic execution. In fact, the only way to introduce true indeterminism into a userspace program is to query a kernel-mediated resource (e.g. system call, shared memory mapping, etc.), or to invoke an unprivileged and unpredictable hardware instruction, of which there are very few (e.g. RDRAND on x64, LL/SC on ARM).

2. Userspace programs cannot be made as robust to accidental or malicious failures. Even if you have a userspace RNG daemon that randomly open files or sockets to extract entropy, what happens if that daemon crashes? Or it fails to open a file or socket? Or an exploit gets an RCE into the daemon to read privileged files? By contrast, the kernel is already performing all these operations for userspace processes, so it might as well measure those things and stick the results into its own entropy pool to hand out to other processes on request.

The kernel needs randomness too. If it's done there right once, why duplicate the effort in userspace (and watch all the hilarious ways userspace solutions fail)?

getrandom was motivated by the fact that using device files has many failure modes.

Oh, nice, a good 3rd security reason! A userland CSPRNG is essentially just an additional single point of failure, since you're going to end up depending on secure randomness in the kernel already.

It's a good question!

Not arguing, but genuinely curious - what do kernels need randomness for?

A lot of bits of security rely on some level of non-determinism. Things like TCP initial sequence number generation, where every TCP connection sequence starts with a random number. There have been numerous attacks where the RNG wasn't good enough, so an attacker could determine the TCP sequencing and perform various malicious activities. Additionally, things like in-kernel VPNs, like IPSEC and WireGuard, also need RNGs for their own internal functions. Calling out to userspace for that would be painful and could potentially break in a lot of unexpected ways.

I don't recall exactly but i think TCP retransmission delay and handshake adds random to the backoff, to avoid a thundering herd situation which repeats again if all clients retry at same time.

Assigning free ports to applications that listen on a socket is also random, not sure why, feels like it could be sequential unless you want to deliberately obscure what ports are being used.

Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR) for one. ASLR moves around key parts of an executable to make exploitation of certain types of vulnerabilities more difficult or impossible.

The kernel can keep secrets from user space, which is necessary for maintaining a secure RNG state.

The kernel also has the hardware access that is used as entropy sources. If the RNG was in user space the kernel would have to provide some way of securely exporting that entropy to user space. It is simpler and more secure to just export the end result of random numbers through a simple API.

All modern OS have made the same decision of having a kernel-based CSRNG, for the same reasons.

Not a silly question at all. It's because having a reliable and uncompromised source of randomness is essential for cryptographic applications. Having the RNG in user space would make it more vulnerable to attack.

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