Eric Biggers <ebigge...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > > By the way: do we really need this in the kernel at all, given that it's
> > > just doing some math on data which userspace has access to?
> > 
> > It is the question about how we want the keys subsystem to operate. The DH
> > shared secret shall not be used as a key. But the DH operation is part of
> > the key subsystem. If there is never a case where the result of the DH
> > operation is used in the kernel, then the KDF can be removed and my
> > patches could be reverted. However, in this case, the entire DH business
> > could be questioned as this can easily be done in user space as well.
> > 
> 
> Well, who exactly is asking for Diffie-Hellman in the kernel at all?  If it
> can be done in userspace then it should be done there.  Having it in the
> kernel means having yet another API that's callable by unprivileged users
> and needs to be audited for security vulnerabilities.  Just because the
> kernel can support doing hashes or has an arbitrary-precision arithmetic
> library or whatever doesn't mean it's the right place to do random crypto
> stuff.

I understood that there is the possibility of offloading this to hardware.

David

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