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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It is 1000x for PR/show. There is no practical security benefit to stuff like this. There's also no meaningful risks to doing it. It just lets them write fun blog posts.

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If they actually integrate this into randomness on their TLS servers, the only risk is that the system for getting the entropy from the lamps and waves somehow screws up, fails to parse an HTTP request or something, and accidentally seeds the whole system with no entropy. Whereas doing literally nothing and just letting Linux boot correctly on metal would be perfectly secure.

Right, but there's no way Cloudflare is making that kind of mistake. If it was a random person on HN talking about how they'd hooked up a bespoke hardware RNG to their TLS stack I'd write some tut-tutting thing about what could go wrong, but here the security of their system collapses down to the LRNG just like every else's.

Maybe, but they've taken something that was effectively risk-free and added risk for absolutely no reason.

yeah, it's not as if they've had terrible bugs like one that sprayed supposedly protected cleartext all over the internet, is it?

In theory, if there is a bug found in the entropy generation used by them and everyone else (like in /dev/urandom), by mixing these in, their source of entropy would still remain unpredictable.

Though this is certainly a pretty expensive if nice looking backup entropy source.

I think you'd probably have a hard time finding a cryptography engineer that agrees about this. I think in Cloudflare's case, they have the resources to "do" this "safely" (in reality, I would expect the overwhelming majority of their fleet uses conventional random number sourcing anyways), but a less-equipped team is actually more likely to harm themselves than hurt themselves trying to do it.

It all nets out to "these are fine blog posts; don't try it at home".

i mean its also nice office decoration and also lets them rank on HN. many companies spend far more on employer branding with far less results.

Yes, we think the same thing about this. I don't have a grudge about it, as long as people don't try to build their own versions of it for security purposes.

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