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Linus Responds To RdRand Petition With Scorn
hypnosec writes "Linus Torvalds, in response to a petition on Change.org to remove RdRand from /dev/random, has lambasted the petitioner by called him ignorant for not understanding the code in the Linux Kernel. Kyle Condon from the UK raised a petition on Change.org to get Linus to remove RdRand from /dev/random in a bid 'to improve the overall security of the linux kernel.' In his response, Torvalds asked Condon and the supporters of the petition to gain an understanding of Linux drivers and cryptography, and then 'come back here and admit to the world that you were wrong.' Torvalds stressed that kernel maintainers knew what they were doing and the petitioner didn't. Torvalds, in a similar outburst just yesterday, hoped that 'ARM SoC hardware designers all die in some incredibly painful accident.' This came in response to a message from Kevin Hilman when he noted that there were quite a few conflicts in the ARM SoC pull request for Linux 3.12 which were a result of the platform changes conflicting with driver changes going in to the V4L tree."
You have the source code, remove rdrand from the kernel yourself.
The TFA makes it look like Linus went on full rampage mode and tore a insightful request down by being mean.
Actually reading his responses, Linus is pretty level headed and just says no, you can't have this.
Guess submitter got his feelings hurt?
Linus is funny while Ballmer acts funny. Worlds apart if you ask me.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
There was an incident a few years ago (that led to at least one subsystem maintainer resigning) where RdRand was used as the EXCLUSIVE entropy source for some items if it were present. http://cryptome.org/2013/07/intel-bed-nsa.htm - Matt Mackall resigned over it.
This is BAD.
If it is now merely feeding the pool as one of multiple sources, then it's OK. If anything is directly exposed to raw rdrand output, something is very wrong.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I think it's more likely that the RDRAND thing has been an ongoing argument/flamewar for a long time. See this thread for an example.
BTW Linus is right. According to what we know about randomness, even if RDRAND is hacked then mixing it with other entropy can't hurt - at worst, it merely is a no-op and achieves nothing. However, even if RDRAND is backdoored, the NSA is not the worlds only adversary. Given that when mixed with other randomness it doesn't hurt, it's still better to use it against all the other adversaries out there than not.
Linus' point is, exclusive reliance on RDRAND would be bad, but the kernel doesn't/shouldn't do that.
Its just a shame that morons like you value social graces over the ability to do real work. This is why companies fail, especially as they get better, playing well with morons is valued over the ability to get shit done.
Based on what?
He has always spoken this way to those who deserved it. Notice he does not go after noobs or people who do not ask for it. If you put up a petition to get something changed, you should at least know what you are talking about.
Someone who has no social skills but uses his persona to stay at the head of the ship.
Well, either that or his technical understanding, organisational skills and the respect of his peers for many a year.
it is just a shame such a social retard is allow to rant as he is.
Guess humour isn't your thing ?
pjk
ARM SoC hardware designers world wide smile into their hand.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
There was no negotiation going on. There was a single obnoxious guy calling Linux "an approved partner of the NSA" and complaining about something he knew nothing about. He deserved what he got. In fact, Linus went pretty easy on him.
No, the guy who made the petition was way out of line for calling Linux "an approved partner of the NSA", and way out of his depth because he had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
Linus was just responding to an asshat, and went pretty easy on him.
I have to admit I didn't know much about the controversy so I went and found some articles.
Here is an article showing some weaknesses in Linux's random generation: Analysis of the Linux Random Number Generator
As reported by Bruce Schneier for this Wired article: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Yeah, it's just Finnish humour that's being taken badly. I know he's been in the US for a long time, but he's not being mean, it's just a way of expression that it appears many don't get. !Still, the AC could always email Linus and ask him to change, I'm sure he'd appreciate the input.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
If you believe there's something broken in the kernel (or other open source project), you don't create a petition, you create and submit a patch. If you don't know enough or don't have the skills to create a patch, you're probably not qualified to criticize the implementation.
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Maintaining your own kernel tree over time is most certainly non-trivial by most peoples standards
Some people just had to complain about every-single-thing, even if it's downright inane.
Open source is just that, you can read the source of the programs, and with the source, you have the options to do the following :
1. Determine if the program has any backdoor / malware embedded
2. Change/alter the source to your own liking
3. Learn from the code and perhaps in a latter day you might be able to apply what you have learned in your own program (and I am not talking about cut and paste)
If all the above are STILL not good enough for you, the offerings from Apple and Microsoft are always available.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
He has always spoken this way to those who deserved it.
From his perspective. I would assert he has as little business talking about ARM SoC hardware designers about their design decisions as they have of telling him how to design an OS.
Anyone who has worked between chip and software teams knows the fights here are epic and unending.
It's getting increasingly difficult to label people tinfoil hatters given the way the NSA leaks are making even the most ardent paranoid conspiracy theorists look like they've vastly underestimated the problem.
...where kindergarten teachers repeat the Golden Rule to him.
I've seen Linus get into an argument with someone of the same style. After a few rounds, it became obviously different that the debate was not like the typical Internet insult-hurling flame war. Rather, each side had points and counter-points and presented a persuasive case... just peppered with insults and offenses, as a separate layer of argument. It's sort of like real insult swordfighting.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I'm with you on that. It seems like his sense of humour and his calling "a spade a spade" philosophy earns him a lot of criticism. I always argue that Linus is your typical purest. He's not there to please or appease. He's there to focus on getting things done right, in his own way, but as correct as he sees it.
I argue that because he's giving Linux freely to the world and with limited monetary gain that we can't chastise him too much about it either. What he's missing is something which I've learned through my own errors when dealing with people in the past. And that is, to deal with "the public" one must always do so with the softest possible touch. That's only if you're wanting to earn the minds of the masses mind you.
So I say. People who bag him with the whole "his attitude is appalling" type statements. Well, it sucks to be you because I think that you're just too much of a sook and you need to harden/lighten up a little. The people who condone the attitude I say "meh, you're probably a purest as well" because they wish to understand truth and wish to see what goes on in the Linus' mind just as I do.
As me for me. Truth be told. The day Linus actually starts acting like the rest of the PR sheep out there is the day I'd start to worry about crypto that NSA may of sneaked in to the Linux kernel. Until then. It's good to see him throwing out comments like "Deep throat Microsoft" and "You're ignorant". This kind of talk is indicative of when the internet wasn't populated by commercially driven cock suckers like Mark Zuckerberg abusing the word "hacker" and trying to pass himself off as "one of us".
So at the end of the day, who's really lost touch here?
It's not only an obnoxious guy, but an uneducated one. You can easily disable it with a compile time option already.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
He didn't create anything. ANYTHING. Open source existed before Torvalds. UNIX existed before Torvalds. To use the infamous battle cry of the typical Slashdork... "Where's teh innovationz?!?!?111!!?"
I've been using Linux since 1993. I can't even begin to tell you how wrong you are :) Oh the memories ... 14.4 modems, 386 DX!! (yes, none of those pussy SX processors), Hercules monitors and MFM harddisks!
When people start treating it like a valid technology instead of a religious movement it'll get more momentum in the mainstream.
You're missing the point. It's not treated as a religious movement It's kind of more like being a 60s child in the modern day if that makes sense.
When people start worrying about advancing Linux over where it stands versus Microsoft or Apple it'll finally have the chance of taking great leaps forward.
Google wrapped a business model around Linux. It's called Android and it's doing just fine.
I'd read TMZ.
Man, I can't wait until the /. submitters discover Theo de Raadt.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
It's not a "cop out" at all. The party that manages the code doesn't want to remove a feature that there's no logical reason to remove. The petition was one sentence, linked to no debate, made no points and didn't even attempt to negotiate. It could have said, "Do it, because we say so." and it would have been just as informative. I think you need to look up the definition of "cop out", because the petition creators could have actually done something useful, and didn't.
Okay then, lets fix this.
The NSA has compromised products and devices in the design phase - both software and hardware. We don't know which products are compromised or how, but we do know that some are.
Random number generators cannot be verified - it's a computationally infeasible problem. If the NSA has subtly tampered with a product, there's no way to tell from the outside looking in. You *might* be able to tell by looking at the generator source. (Note that the linux random number generator has at least one undocumented source of entropy.)
There is no reasonable way to look at the source code/microcode of the rdrand instruction.
Additionally, there is no way to verify the underlying source of randomness of the rdrand instruction. There could be vulnerabilities on the silicon die.
The whole point of open source is that people can peek at the software and see what's going on.
Since there is no way to inspect the random number generator and no way to verify it's operation, it should not be used by default.
It's a security risk, plain and simple, and risk management should be up to the user. However small the risk is, forcing everyone to take it multiplies the chance that someone will get burned by it.
Here's your logical argument. If Linus wants to debate this, let him address these issues. Linus needs to show the premises wrong, or that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.
If he can't, then he should abide by the recommendation.
'"ARM SoC hardware designers all die in some incredibly painful accident."
I mean, maybe Linus hasn't had the experience of losing someone in an incredibly painful accident.
Well, how is he supposed to hope people die? Being batted by soft pillows while sitting in the comfy chair?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
And by disabling RdRand, you can only decrease security, so it would be pretty stupid to do so. But that requires actually understanding how an entropy pool works, something the petitioner does not. Basically, the only sane reason to disable it is for tests.
In fact of the sheer stupidity of the request, Linus was pretty friendly in its answer. He is also 100% right.
If you look at what Intel apparently wanted, namely drop the entropy pool and only use RdRandom (https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/SDcoemc9V3J), _that_ would have been highly problematic. But Theodore Ts'o actually understands how these things work and refused. I thought it was a pretty good call back then (and I seem to remember that Linus called this one wrong but learned better), and now it looks like it prevented a world of trouble. On the other hand, we now have strong indication that some Intel engineers have been compromised by the NSA.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.