On 16/07/14 03:06, Paul Tagliamonte wrote: > I didn't see this yet in the thread, so: > https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/libressls_prng_is_unsafe_on_linux
What's most interesting is that someone spent such effort to look for this; that there are so many eyes now on both the original OpenSSL and the new LibreSSL code. Both projects ought to benefit from this. This was a real, but totally contrived issue with many preconditions: * initial 'grandparent' process initialises LibreSSL's PRNG, then forks * first-forked process does not use the PRNG yet, but forks again * grandparent uses the PRNG for things and then exits, freeing up the pid to be re-used * second-forked 'grandchild' process might coincidentally get the same pid as its grandparent * grandchild uses the PRNG for things; LibreSSL would not realise it has forked if the pid is the same, so does not reseed - PRNG output would be repeated from what the grandparent got before it exited - possibly having security impact The other major concern was about scary entropy-gathering code, implemented in LibreSSL Portable for Linux as a last resort for when /dev/urandom can't be read. I agree that it's too risky, or: too difficult to prove safe and robust in any conceivable situation. Debian's major OpenSSL bug was able to happen undetected for a while out of similar circumstances. A compile-time ifdef already allows to disable this fallback code and raise SIGKILL instead, crashing the calling process. As part of the LibreSSL port to GNU/kFreeBSD and Hurd I would actually have asked that we do this anyway in Debian, at least for those platforms. It seems extreme, but the point is that something must be wrong on the system if we get to the fallback code - /dev/urandom missing from a chroot, or fd's exhausted, and the kernel not having a reliable sysctl interface like OpenBSD's to get random bytes in the first place. Regards, -- Steven Chamberlain ste...@pyro.eu.org
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