[Freedombox-discuss] Add Raspberry Pi as a reference platform?

[Sandy Harris]

Petter Reinholdtsen <pere at hungry.com> wrote:

> A lot of my friends have one or more Raspberry Pi machines, and I even
> got one myself too.  But no-one I know nearby own a Dreamplug.  This
> tell me that the availability of the Debian based Freedombox reference
> platform is low, and I believe this limit the number of people joining
> the project.
>
> A way to tap into the resource of people already owning an Raspberry
> Pi and interested in taking back control over their own computer use
> and communication needs, would be to announce that Raspberry Pi will
> also be a reference platform for the Freedombox project.

Good idea.

Also, the Rasberry PI includes a hardware random number generator
and, as far as I can tell the Dreamplug does not. High-grade random
numbers are essential for most crypto, and therefore for security, and
they are quite difficult to do with software, especially on a headless
server with solid state storage.

For that reason alone, I would say the Rasberry Pi is a /far better/
platform for the Box than Dreamplug.

I have written software intended to solve this problem for the
Dreamplug and other systems without a hardware RNG
ftp://ftp.cs.sjtu.edu.cn:990/sandy/maxwell/

There are also several other ways to solve it; see the paper
on that site for discussion. Personally, though, I'd be extremely
reluctant to use any system without a hardware RNG for
security-critical applications.

The only way I know to get a hardware RNG on a Dreamplug
would involve getting Turbid into Debian:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=591472

That lets you use the sound hardware on the plug as an
RNG. This looks problematic since some users would
want sound for other applications.