Distributing entropy to virtual machines.

Posted by Louis on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Louis
Published on 2011-01-06T13:13:16Z Indexed on 2011/01/06 13:55 UTC
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Dear All,

I'm interested in generating secret keys for SSL on virtual machines using true randomness. By true randomness I mean the same level of entropy that can be generated by UNIX's dev/random and entropy gathering daemon (EGD).

Is there a "general knowledge" recipe to route entropy from the physical layer to the virtual machines via the hypervisor regardless of the Hypervisor/Guest OS combination?

Example: suppose one "hypervises" with VMware VSphere and instantiates Windows Guest OS. Can this hypervisor collect entropy from its peripherals (like dev/random/ would) and distribute it to these guest Windows OS?

When considering the big vendors (VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix, etc), do they have entropy pools that gather entropy that can easily be pushed to their respective virtual machines?

Louis

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