As mentioned in the PELD spec, it is not so easy to get good pseudo-random numbers in the context of a Live system. This document describes how Tails behaves in this area, and the work that is left to be done.

Entropy sources

In addition to the Linux kernel's own entropy gathering facilities, Tails uses auxiliary entropy sources, that we describe below.

haveged

Tails ships HAVEGE, that fills /dev/random whenever the supply of random bits in /dev/random falls below the low water mark of the device. Quoting its homepage, HAVEGE "exploits [these] modifications of the internal volatile hardware states as a source of uncertainty".

The default configuration shipped with the Debian package passes -w 1024 to the haveged daemon. That is, it sets /proc/sys/kernel/random/write_wakeup_threshold to 1024. We modify that to use the same watermark as rngd, i.e. 2048 bits. The goal here is to avoid the situation when rngd starts first and always keeps the entropy pool between 1024 and 2048 bits, thus dominating the entropy pool.

rngd

rngd gets entropy from a hardware RNG, if available. Otherwise, it does not start.

rngd fills up the pool using an ioctl on /dev/random to add entropy. It does that unless fill-watermark bits are available. The fill-watermark defaults to 50% of the size of the entropy pool, which itself defaults to 4096 bits on Linux 3.14, so basically rngd feeds the entropy pool unless there are already 2048 bits in it. The Debian package does not override this default configuration, and neither does Tails.

Note: rngd (2-unofficial-mt.14-1) does not modify any parameter in /proc/sys/kernel/random/.

Remaining concerns

HAVEGE reliability

haveged relies on the RDTSC instruction, that apparently is useless in some virtualized environments. Also, the quality of random numbers output by HAVEGE is unclear, and the topic of many discussions.

Further research on this topic is left to be done.

This is why Tails also ships rngd. Still, it is not clear how these two daemons act together.

Hardware RNG trustworthiness and availability

It is not clear how much one can trust a hardware RNG, that is hard, if not impossible, to audit. Also, not all computers include a hardware RNG.

This is why Tails also ships HAVEGE. Still, it is not clear how these two daemons act together.

Interaction between haveged and rngd

This discussion only makes sense whenever a hardware RNG supported by rngd is available. Otherwise, only haveged is used.

The way it is configured in Debian, haveged sets /proc/sys/kernel/random/write_wakeup_threshold to 2048, so that processes that are waiting to write to /dev/random are woken up whenever less than 2048 bits of entropy is available. In practice, this probably means that Linux wakes up both haveged and rngd more or less at the same time.

In such a case, haveged tries to write as many bytes as needed to fill the pool via a single ioctl, while rngd tries to write 512 bits (the default value of random_step being 64 bytes) at a time, until the pool contains 2048 bits (default value of the pool water mark). It's unclear which one wins the race. Let's discuss the possible cases:

  • If haveged always wins the case, then it is actually useless to run rngd at all.

  • If rngd always wins the race, then it dominates the entropy pool, but shipping haveged is still useful when no hardware RNG is available.

  • If the one that wins the race may change depending on the context, then it's still useful to ship both rngd and haveged: it achieves our goal of not relying purely on either one.

Interaction between haveged and rngd

This area is left to be researched.

Random pool seeding

On Debian Jessie, in the absence of any /var/lib/systemd/random-seed (Tails ships no such file), urandom.service runs systemd-random-seed load, that won't write anything to /dev/urandom (so we rely purely on the kernel and current system entropy to get /dev/urandom right).

This behavior is basically what Jake suggested earlier on this ticket, combined with #10779.

We've been in undefined behavior area forever: on Debian Wheezy, the urandom initscript was seeding /dev/urandom at boot time with the output of date +%s.%N, concatenated with the content of /var/lib/urandom/random-seed; this file was included in Tails ISO images, and its content was fixed, public, and shared between all -systems running a given Tails release.

So this can't be much worse, and the fact it's the new debootstrap and systemd default behavior tends to be somewhat reassuring.

Still, not persisting the state of the entropy pools between Tails boots seems to be wrong: #7675.

Early boot time

One should audit random numbers availability at early boot time: #6116.