Turris Omnia - rtrom01
Turris OS 3.9.6
Kernel 4.4.119-082ea0f4a4e204b99821bedcb349ed54-0
Firmware OpenWrt omnia 15.05 r47055 / LuCI 49c3edd5861fd032fa8379ceda525c27a908a114 branch (git-17.212.24321-49c3edd)
Based on the a.m. system the available entropy is hovering around 160 which is way too low. I was under the impression that for such purpose there is a dedicated chip
Random number generation is very important when it comes to cryptography. And to get really random numbers, one needs a good source of randomness (entropy). It has been shown many times that embedded devices, such as SOHO routers, do not have enough sources of entropy, which can lead to security weaknesses. This is why we added a dedicated chip into Omnia, which can serve as a high quality entropy source.
How then to utilize this dedicted chip for a healthy entroty quantity out of the box? What is the purpose of the dedicated crypto chip if it does not produce a healthy amount of entropy?
To my understanding tools like haveged and rng-tools would be just other (pseudo) entropy sources and not procure entropy from the dedicated crypto chip. Deploying such pseudo source would render the dedicated crypto chip obsolete, would it not?