On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 11:44:01AM -0500, Wietse Venema wrote:

> Is Postfix is still the default MTA? If so then it is surprising
> than this /dev/urandom bug was not found during testing.

On my current 10.5 system, yes Postfix is still the default MTA, but:

    $ /usr/sbin/postconf -d tls_random_source
    tls_random_source = 

So Apple may have worked-around the inconvenient security feature. :-(

The first call to RAND_bytes() in OpenSSL will (it seems after a
quick read of OpenSSL source code) call RAND_poll() once which reads
"/dev/urandom", via poll() on Linux systeme and select() on other
Unix-like systems...

So disabling all entropy gathering in tls_mgr() is perhaps not
catastrophic, but it is not a good idea.

> Allowing /dev/*random to block Postfix is not a good idea, because
> these reads are done by a single tlsmgr process.

Yes.

-- 
        Viktor.

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