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Date:      Fri, 21 Nov 2014 18:45:19 +0000
From:      Mark R V Murray <mark@grondar.org>
To:        Ian Lepore <ian@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        arch@freebsd.org, John-Mark Gurney <jmg@funkthat.com>, Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r274739 - head/sys/mips/conf
Message-ID:  <026FEB8A-CA8C-472F-A8E4-DA3D0AC44B34@grondar.org>
In-Reply-To: <1416582989.1147.250.camel@revolution.hippie.lan>
References:  <201411200552.sAK5qnXP063073@svn.freebsd.org> <20141120084832.GE24601@funkthat.com> <AE8F2D30-7F91-4C90-B79A-D99857D8AED8@grondar.org> <20141121092245.GI99957@funkthat.com> <1416582989.1147.250.camel@revolution.hippie.lan>

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> On 21 Nov 2014, at 15:16, Ian Lepore <ian@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>=20
>> If you can demonstrate a usable system w/o much modifications that
>> runs w/ the dummy interface, or no boot random, that I'll drop my
>> suggestion...  I'll try removing random tomorrow and see what =
breaks...
>>=20
>=20
> If your point is that after the recent commits you can no longer do
> these things, then I guess that's kind of hard to argue with given =
that
> some of us have been trying to say for a couple years that if=20
> /dev/random starts blocking to wait for entropy at startup, existing
> *functional* small systems will stop working.

As a fair bit of the security subsystem depends on working /dev/random,
this is true.

HOWEVER - I=E2=80=99m most willing to entertain ideas on how to get a =
general
config going that disables anything that is /dev/random-dependant.

Asking the SO to break sshd(8) isn=E2=80=99t going to work, but enabling
(say) telnet and/or rsh in the !random(4) case could be a way to do
it.

> Before those changes everything worked fine on the 90mhz 64MB arm
> systems we build products around, which have no more than a few bits =
of
> entropy available during the boot process, and which (I'll say it =
again
> even though nobody has ever paid any attention to it) don't actually
> need any entropy to come up and do what it is they are designed to do.
>=20
> They don't use https (a few of them don't even have network
> connections).  They use ssh for its convenience (it's better than
> telnet), but NOT for security.  (And really, whether that makes sense =
to
> you or not, "the system must be secure" is not your decision to make.)

Why not just use rsh? If the security overhead is onerous, don=E2=80=99t =
use it.

> I haven't tested a recent -current on those small systems, but we've
> already resigned ourselves to sticking with 8.x for those older boards
> just because the tide of bloat (both code and policy) is too much to
> swim against.

Yet you use ssh?

M
--=20
Mark R V Murray




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