[Whonix-devel] How to confirm jitter .ko was loaded

Wed Apr 24 20:21:08 CEST 2019

Am Mittwoch, 24. April 2019, 19:30:28 CEST schrieb procmem at riseup.net:

Hi,

> Hi Stephan. Whonix dev here. We are a VM based privacy distro and so are
> very interested in jitter for our RNG needs.
> 
> I was wondering how we can confirm jitterentropy's kernel module was
> successfully loaded during boot so we can be sure it works on some
> platforms.

cat /proc/crypto | grep jitter
> 
> Do you know if it should be functional on the Xen hypervisor where Linux
> does not have full control over bare-metal?

Yes, definitely. Besides, the Jitter RNG will not initialize if it finds that 
the platform does not provide the correct properties for the RNG. The Jitter 
RNG has also a runtime check. If that runtime check identifies platform 
failures, you will see that in dmesg :-)

Though, please note that the Jitter RNG in the kernel ONLY seeds the kernel 
DRBG and NOT /dev/random or /dev/urandom. If you want to seed them, you need 
either the jitterentropy-rngd (which seems to be currently tested) or the 
latest version of rngd which contains the JitterRNG as one noise source.
> 
> cc/ our mailing list do our users can benefit.

Ciao
Stephan