Skip to content
Commit aba120cc authored by Jason A. Donenfeld's avatar Jason A. Donenfeld
Browse files

random: do not allow user to keep crng key around on stack



The fast key erasure RNG design relies on the key that's used to be used
and then discarded. We do this, making judicious use of
memzero_explicit().  However, reads to /dev/urandom and calls to
getrandom() involve a copy_to_user(), and userspace can use FUSE or
userfaultfd, or make a massive call, dynamically remap memory addresses
as it goes, and set the process priority to idle, in order to keep a
kernel stack alive indefinitely. By probing
/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail to learn when the crng key is
refreshed, a malicious userspace could mount this attack every 5 minutes
thereafter, breaking the crng's forward secrecy.

In order to fix this, we just overwrite the stack's key with the first
32 bytes of the "free" fast key erasure output. If we're returning <= 32
bytes to the user, then we can still return those bytes directly, so
that short reads don't become slower. And for long reads, the difference
is hopefully lost in the amortization, so it doesn't change much, with
that amortization helping variously for medium reads.

We don't need to do this for get_random_bytes() and the various
kernel-space callers, and later, if we ever switch to always batching,
this won't be necessary either, so there's no need to change the API of
these functions.

Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Reviewed-by: default avatarJann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Fixes: c92e040d ("random: add backtracking protection to the CRNG")
Fixes: 186873c5

 ("random: use simpler fast key erasure flow on per-cpu keys")
Signed-off-by: default avatarJason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
parent 48bff105
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment