On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 05:13:50PM +0200, Stephan Mueller wrote:
>
> Surely, the shadow approach scales better than a global lock. But its 
> drawback 
> is the (almost) identical state.

The drawback is that your DRBG is no longer anything like that
specified by the standard.  You've completely changed the
cryptography by reusing the internal state.

> Rafael: do you have any better idea here other than remove the shadow copy 
> approach and use a global lock?

I don't think you can get around the global lock due to the sequential
nature of the DRBG that is built into its design.

> >The only users of RNG in the crypto API do so in process context
> >so we can make it a rule that all users RNG must be in process
> >context.
> 
> Herbert, which type of lock am I allowed to use? Is a spin lock sufficient or 
> shall I use a mutex. I am not fully sure whether the used shash or cipher 
> type 
> can sleep.

As I said we can make it a rule that any user of our RNG must be in
process context (all existing users are) so you can use a mutex.

Also, if we change the entropy source to a blocking one as discussed
in the other thread then you'd definitely want to have a mutex intead
of a spin lock.

Cheers,
-- 
Email: Herbert Xu <herb...@gondor.apana.org.au>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt
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