[Pki-clean-room-devel] Entropy gathering

[Rebecca N. Palmer]

Sergey Matveev wrote Sat Oct 7 13:52:27 UTC 2017:> So, clean-room 
project assumes that GnuPG and all related tools deal
> with blocking /dev/random and have a guarantee that if there is no
> enough entropy in the system, they will block, collecting it?
> [...]
> Current project's wiki page says
> nothing about that issues and, according to it, I can quickly boot
> stateless clean computer and generate keys after a minute -- it is
> dangerious.

I did that, and it took ~10min of random typing to generate 4xrsa4096, 
at an explicit "We need to generate a lot of random bytes" GPG prompt, 
so it appears to me that GPG does wait for entropy and hence this isn't 
a security problem.

However, I'm not an expert on this, and if I'm wrong and need to throw 
out that key and start again, I'd rather know that now, before I start 
collecting signatures.

(This was done in my stretch-based cleanroom described at 
https://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2018/02/msg00012.html , which 
unlike this repository's, does *not* include haveged.  My hardware has 
RDRAND, but I don't know whether anything was using it.)