2019-07-05
I tested the randomness setup 1 year ago
Doing some more reading on haveged made me decide to test the actual randomness of my setup with haveged and randomsound which I created to fix the lack of entropy for dnssec signing operations so I booted the same testing virtual machine which can tap from the host /dev/random. I ran rngtest until it was time to shut down the laptop which was showing the output. The result:$ rngtest < /dev/random rngtest 2-unofficial-mt.14 Copyright (c) 2004 by Henrique de Moraes Holschuh This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. rngtest: starting FIPS tests... ^Crngtest: bits received from input: 4999640 rngtest: FIPS 140-2 successes: 249 rngtest: FIPS 140-2 failures: 0 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Monobit: 0 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Poker: 0 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Runs: 0 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Long run: 0 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Continuous run: 0 rngtest: input channel speed: (min=303.011; avg=543.701; max=5684.774)bits/s rngtest: FIPS tests speed: (min=43.251; avg=64.587; max=84.771)Mibits/s rngtest: Program run time: 9194254192 microsecondsI ratelimited the virtio-rng-pci driver from the host, so the test took a really long time. Given earlier tries with dnssec-signzone this is fast enough. No need to buy a hardware random generator, although they are way cool and it would be an idea to have a source of correctness (NTP) next to a source of randomness. Update: I ran rngtest on /dev/urandom and I had to ask for a really big load of blocks to get failures. The first test with 249 blocks gave the same result as above, just a lot higher bit rate. So now I know less about the correct randomness of my setup but at least the test shows that I can safely run dnssec-signzone which was the original idea.