Challenges with Entropy Sources in Diverse and Distributed Computing Platforms (U12c)
Entropy is the bedrock of cryptography and related security controls. But if sourcing high-assurance and FIPS-validatable entropy does not operate at scale, systems will bypass it or skip FIPS modes of operation altogether. This talk will discuss the challenges that the speakers have experienced running existing entropy sources at scale, both for user-space cryptographic libraries and Linux operating systems. It will also dive into the challenges with ensuring sufficient entropy in less common compute environments. For example, compute instances booted from virtual machine snapshots that come online with duplicated address spaces and entropy pools. The speakers will surface the speakers’ proposed solutions to some of these challenges.