[Swan-dev] lost art: using TPM for entropy

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I used to use an old machine for testing.  After a long hiatus, I'm 
trying again, with a fresh install of everything

The processor is an Intel i5-2400 "Sandy Bridge".  This processor does not 
have the RDRAND feature.  You can test your own processor:
	grep rdrand /proc/cpuinfo

To get more entropy without RDRAND, I used to use the TPM feature of
the computer.  I wrote it up here:
<https://libreswan.org/wiki/Entropy_matters#using_TPM_entropy_on_Fedora_23>

This does not work on Fedora 28.  The most obvious thing is that there
no longer is a tpm-rng module in the kernel:
Jul 19 22:39:14 localhost.localdomain systemd-modules-load[490]: Failed to find module 'tpm-rng'

Consequently rngd fails.
Jul 19 22:39:15 localhost.localdomain rngd[686]: Failed to init entropy source 1: TPM RNG Device
Jul 19 22:39:15 localhost.localdomain rngd[686]: Failed to init entropy source 2: Intel RDRAND Instruction RNG
Jul 19 22:39:15 localhost.localdomain rngd[686]: Enabling JITTER rng support

I think that JITTER is a new user-space entropy gleaner.  I imagine
that TPM RNG would still be beneficial.

Does anyone know what the new way of using the TPM RNG?  Is there any
documentation of this?  random(4) and random(7) don't help.

This is intriguing but not actually helpful:
	<https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/6/8/72>
It suggests that the tpm driver does have a function "tpm_add_hwrng"
but doesn't say how it might get invoked.

Somewhere in here might be something useful:
	[build at redbird libreswan]$ find /sys -name 'tpm*'
	/sys/kernel/security/tpm0
	find: ‘/sys/kernel/debug’: Permission denied
	/sys/class/tpmrm
	/sys/class/tpm
	/sys/class/tpm/tpm0
	/sys/devices/pnp0/00:04/tpm
	/sys/devices/pnp0/00:04/tpm/tpm0
	find: ‘/sys/fs/pstore’: Permission denied
	find: ‘/sys/fs/bpf’: Permission denied
	/sys/bus/platform/drivers/tpm_tis
	/sys/bus/pnp/drivers/tpm_tis
	/sys/bus/acpi/drivers/tpm_crb
	/sys/module/tpm_tis
	/sys/module/tpm_crb
	/sys/module/tpm_tis_core
	/sys/module/tpm

Reading this code, I would have expected a tpm-rngd-%d
<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tree/drivers/char/tpm/tpm-chip.c#n378>

================

It is possible that the TPM is being used automatically.  But I have
suspiciously many tests coming out "unresolved".  And the whole test
run seems to be taking a long time.  For example, right now 399 of 746
tests have been run and 231 are unresolved.

My other test machine (with RDRAND hardware) gets more unresolved
results than Andrew expects.  Sometimes 20 at the end of a whole run.
I thought that the problem might be that it uses a hard disk.  So I
put an SSD in the Sandy Bridge machine but unresolved gets a lot
worse.

================

I have not set
	/etc/modules-load.d/virtio.conf
as specified by
	<https://libreswan.org/wiki/Test_Suite#ensure_that_the_host_has_enough_entropy>
There's too little explanation for me to trust it.

Perhaps that is my problem.