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this is generally true however if an adversary is able to control a source it becomes dangerous if they can preview the results or inspect the other sources.


Right, so your starting point is that the attacker has read-only access to ALL entropy sources, and in that scenario it's worse if the attacker has read-write access to one entropy source.

Yes. I don't find this a particularly interesting scenario, though. Sure, we can come up with stuxnet-like airgap attacks where we on-device, but not remotely, can read entropy sources. AND we can modify the output of RDRAND. And there keys have been generated for data we can later intercept. But despite that control (potentially on a CPU microcode level) we are unable to stegonographically leak it?

Sure. Possible. Has it ever happened?


Not to the kernel random pool, no.


this is a well known attack...

if your algorithm controls a source of entropy and can inspect the other sources, it can craft its source to bias the result. a fanciful attack but it means you should at least discriminate what you put into the pool.


Can you link to the paper you're thinking of? Maybe people are just talking past each other here. A biased random source can't bias the kernel random pool in any straightforward kind of way.


I explicitly said

    > it becomes dangerous if they can preview the results or inspect the other sources
because the malicious source can just precompute the hash for the bias it wants.

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html


You're assuming a hash preimage attack, which would be a complete break of the cryptosystem. (Your link only works on the toy implementation given.)


there is no preimage attack involved.

while you cannot take control over the hash output you can bias it because you have multiple tries. that's how bitcoin mining works too...

for cryptographic applications any bias can be engineered to be fatal in one way or another.




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