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Commit e3c1c4fd authored by Jason A. Donenfeld's avatar Jason A. Donenfeld
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random: check for signals every PAGE_SIZE chunk of /dev/[u]random

In 1448769c

 ("random: check for signal_pending() outside of
need_resched() check"), Jann pointed out that we previously were only
checking the TIF_NOTIFY_SIGNAL and TIF_SIGPENDING flags if the process
had TIF_NEED_RESCHED set, which meant in practice, super long reads to
/dev/[u]random would delay signal handling by a long time. I tried this
using the below program, and indeed I wasn't able to interrupt a
/dev/urandom read until after several megabytes had been read. The bug
he fixed has always been there, and so code that reads from /dev/urandom
without checking the return value of read() has mostly worked for a long
time, for most sizes, not just for <= 256.

Maybe it makes sense to keep that code working. The reason it was so
small prior, ignoring the fact that it didn't work anyway, was likely
because /dev/random used to block, and that could happen for pretty
large lengths of time while entropy was gathered. But now, it's just a
chacha20 call, which is extremely fast and is just operating on pure
data, without having to wait for some external event. In that sense,
/dev/[u]random is a lot more like /dev/zero.

Taking a page out of /dev/zero's read_zero() function, it always returns
at least one chunk, and then checks for signals after each chunk. Chunk
sizes there are of length PAGE_SIZE. Let's just copy the same thing for
/dev/[u]random, and check for signals and cond_resched() for every
PAGE_SIZE amount of data. This makes the behavior more consistent with
expectations, and should mitigate the impact of Jann's fix for the
age-old signal check bug.

---- test program ----

  #include <unistd.h>
  #include <signal.h>
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <sys/random.h>

  static unsigned char x[~0U];

  static void handle(int) { }

  int main(int argc, char *argv[])
  {
    pid_t pid = getpid(), child;
    signal(SIGUSR1, handle);
    if (!(child = fork())) {
      for (;;)
        kill(pid, SIGUSR1);
    }
    pause();
    printf("interrupted after reading %zd bytes\n", getrandom(x, sizeof(x), 0));
    kill(child, SIGTERM);
    return 0;
  }

Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
parent 1448769c
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