On some small machines with little entropy, a quasi-unique hostname is
sometimes a relevant factor. I've seen, for example, 8 character
alpha-numeric serial numbers. In addition, the time at which the hostname
is set is usually a decent measurement of how long early boot took. So,
call add_device_randomness() on new hostnames, which feeds its arguments
to the RNG in addition to a fresh cycle counter.
Low cost hooks like this never hurt and can only ever help, and since
this costs basically nothing for an operation that is never a fast path,
this is an overall easy win.
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Dominik Brodowski <linux@dominikbrodowski.net> Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
projects / linux-stable / commit