Re: [saag] AD review of draft-iab-crypto-alg-agility-06

[Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]>]

Viktor Dukhovni <[e-mail]> writes:

>I concur, but am a bit worried about low entropy at system build time.

Better to have at least low-entropy keys than no-entropy keys, which is the
alternative when users don't (or can't) generate keys themselves post-
install...

(The low-entropy issue is also largely a hypothetical one, in that people
worry about it without doing much measuring.  When I evaluated it, admittedly
many years ago, I found there was actually more entropy available after
something like a system restart because of all the nondeterminism introduced
by the boot process.  Same with provisioning embedded devices, if you generate
the keys externally on a high-entropy system when you're loading the firmware
onto a limited device you're getting better entropy than if you generated them
on-device.  In any case though, anything is better than fixed private keys,
which far too many systems use).

Peter.