NetRNG

Note: The master branch of this code is alpha quality but usable.

NetRNG is effectively a network connected hardware random number generator.

It allows devices like the RaspberryPi, Beaglebone, or any machine with a TPM, Entropy Key, or other hardware random number generator onboard to act as a NetRNG server, providing high quality random data to other machines on the network.

Virtual machines can potentially benefit the most from NetRNG, as they typically suffer from poor quality local entropy sources due to their running environment.

No application or kernel changes are required on NetRNG Client machines; any application using /dev/random and /dev/urandom will automatically and transparently receive entropy from the NetRNG server.

Why it exists

EntropyBroker is the closest similar project I know of, but it didn't build when I tried to use it, and the code seems quite large and complicated for a task that, conceptually, is very simple.

So I wrote NetRNG. It's simple code, easy to maintain, easy to deploy, and with the exception of some network protocol issues before v0.1, it works quite well.

How it works

As a complete system, NetRNG links /dev/hwrng on one machine, to /dev/random on many others, carefully ensuring that each machine receives unique entropy samples, while allowing the entropy to be validated for quality and ensuring that entropy is fairly distributed among connected clients.

It is essentially a persistent pipeline from one machine to many others, with some minor restrictions on how the pipeline functions to make it suitable for the task.

However, NetRNG itself does one job and only one job: it moves random data around on the local network. Other tasks like validating the samples and providing them to the kernel entropy pool are left to rngd from rng-tools, which is automatically started and managed by NetRNG.

Server

The NetRNG server reads from /dev/hwrng (configurable), dividing up the stream in to non-repeating, non-overlapping samples of a size defined in the configuration file, then sends each one to clients on the local network.

The maximum number of clients that will be accepted can be configured on the server, this allows you to prevent a slow HWRNG from being spread too thin among too many clients.

I'm working on a QoS style load management system that will allow you to guarantee that each connected client can receive entropy samples at a specific rate, 10KB/s for example. Clients would be allowed to connect until the server could no longer guarantee that entropy rate to each of them.

Client

The client starts rngd from rng-tools as a subprocess, then connects to the server and starts requesting entropy samples from it. Then each sample is forwarded to rngd for processing.

Then, rngd validates the quality of the entropy sample before submitting it to the Linux or FreeBSD kernel for other programs to use via /dev/random.

Common devices to use as the NetRNG server

RaspberryPi
Beaglebone
PC Engines ALIX
Various server mainboards
Any machine with a TPM chip onboard
Any machine with an Entropy Key

Setup

There is very little actual configuration required for NetRNG, it is packaged on PyPi as a universal wheel, and can be installed with pip.

Feel free to install it wherever you like, but /opt/NetRNG is where the bundled init/upstart script point, so if you install somewhere else make sure to change them after copying to the proper location in /etc/.

I don't advise installing the package in the global Python installation, but you can if you want to. If possible just use a virtualenv to make things easier :)

Note: these instructions are written for Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives, you'll need to determine the equivalent native package names for build-essential and python-dev.

The virtualenv activation is repeated on purpose in certain steps to ensure that someone who isn't following the steps sequentially won't accidentally install python modules in the global system (not being root helps here, but just in case...).

Create virtualenv

Create a virtualenv for NetRNG:

virtualenv /opt/NetRNG

Setup build environment

Some NetRNG dependencies require building Python C extensions, a compiler and Python development headers are needed so they'll build properly:

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install python-dev

The wheel module is also needed to build NetRNG, so make sure it is installed in the virtualenv:

source /opt/NetRNG/bin/activate
pip install wheel

Install NetRNG

source /opt/NetRNG/bin/activate
pip install netrng

Install rng-tools

On some Linux distributions, rng-tools is installed by default. For others you will need to install it yourself.

On Ubuntu or Debian you can install it like this:

sudo apt-get install rng-tools

Configuration

Copy the sample config file:

cp /opt/NetRNG/conf/netrng.conf.sample /etc/netrng.conf

NetRNG requires very little configuration on most systems.

The listen_address must be set correctly on the Server, and server_address must be set correctly on the client if Zeroconf is disabled.

Zeroconf

Zeroconf is enabled by default in the configuration file, just make sure to set the listen_address correctly on the server.

The client will ignore the server_address setting when Zeroconf is enabled.

Run for testing

Since the compiled daemon script is available on your path while the virtualenv is activated, you can run it directly after the config file is determined to be correct:

source /opt/NetRNG/bin/activate
netrngd

Long term use

I have written both Upstart and systemd scripts for netrngd.

If someone would like to contribute other types of init scripts I will gladly accept a pull request.

To use the the systemd script:

cp /opt/NetRNG/conf/netrng.service /etc/systemd/system/
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start netrng

To use the Upstart script:

cp /opt/NetRNG/conf/netrng.conf.upstart /etc/init/netrng.conf
service netrng start