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Comment by hannibal5 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think he has to explain anything. It's clear that change.org petition was result of circle jerk that caused unnecessary confusion. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but not everyone is entitled to professional opinion.

When I read about the issue, I was little concerned but did not follow trough. It seems that the whole issue started from people who don't know what they they are talking and who did not check facts. More and more people join and take the SOME approach of enjoying the discussion but not doing the work. This causes FUD and is bad thing. People who do this should be burned just like Linus did.

Btw. Using XOR to mix two random streams is textbook correct way to do it. It's simple and correct .

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I would prefer a cryptographer, not Linus, to weigh in on how Linux's PRNG works and what impact RdRand would have on it. It's not that I distrust Linus, it's just that it's hard to separate the vitriol from the facts. That, and a second opinion on the matter would settle it. That'd put the FUD to rest.

However, I found this message a good explanation of what RdRand is/does and how they're integrating it with /dev/random. http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-crypto/msg05883.html

If you're willing to believe Linux's PRNG is not biased in any way then you're fine, because anything ^ random -> random. That's the principle behind the one-time pads:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

Worst case (say, a string of 0s) you don't add any entropy to the pool. But you can't actually remove entropy with a simple xor. Again, that's assuming there are no other weaknesses in the linux PRNG.

Linus was responding to totally unsubstantiated request based on wrong information.

The guy behind /dev/random is Ted Ts'o who has worked as Kerberos V5 project leader is part of security area directorate in IETF and chair of IPSec working group.

As far as I see /dev/random uses the best practices and don't innovate unnecessarily. If somebody is willing to spend time actually vetting the implementation, that would be great.

Whoah whoah whoah let's not go too far here. There are things not to like about Linux devrandom. They have nothing to do with NSA backdoors, though.

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