Bug 115589 – dropbear ebuild with support for urandom USE flag

• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Pardsbane 2005-12-14 13:53:57 UTC]

attached is a 0.46-r1 ebuild which changes the random device to /dev/urandom if
the urandom USE flag is set. It does not change the behavior of the existing
"fallback to urandom" patch.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

[Comment 1 Pardsbane 2005-12-14 13:54:48 UTC]

Created attachment 74761 [details]
r1 ebuild with USE=urandom support

[Comment 2 SpanKY 2005-12-14 14:01:09 UTC]

i dont see much benefit in this

[Comment 3 Pardsbane 2005-12-14 15:51:03 UTC]

The benefit is that when you know /dev/random does not work, such as on an embedded system, you can 
skip the extra-long timeout and go straight to /dev/urandom. 

The fallback approach in the ebuild is nice, but why not let users have the control if they know they need 
it? And why would the dropbear maintainer implement the feature if it wasn't supposed to be used?

[Comment 4 SpanKY 2005-12-14 15:59:13 UTC]

i was going to fix the fallback patch to not delay

[Comment 5 Pardsbane 2005-12-14 16:01:25 UTC]

How would that work? Doesn't the fallback have to wait till /dev/random times out before trying urandom? 

[Comment 6 SpanKY 2005-12-14 16:05:22 UTC]

read the patch ... i would merely remove the call to sleep()