f06295b44c
While discussing[1] the need for glibc to have access to random bytes during program load, it seems that an earlier attempt to implement AT_RANDOM got stalled. This implements a random 16 byte string, available to every ELF program via a new auxv AT_RANDOM vector. [1] http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2008-10/msg00006.html Ulrich said: glibc needs right after startup a bit of random data for internal protections (stack canary etc). What is now in upstream glibc is that we always unconditionally open /dev/urandom, read some data, and use it. For every process startup. That's slow. ... The solution is to provide a limited amount of random data to the starting process in the aux vector. I suggested 16 bytes and this is what the patch implements. If we need only 16 bytes or less we use the data directly. If we need more we'll use the 16 bytes to see a PRNG. This avoids the costly /dev/urandom use and it allows the kernel to use the most adequate source of random data for this purpose. It might not be the same pool as that for /dev/urandom. Concerns were expressed about the depletion of the randomness pool. But this patch doesn't make the situation worse, it doesn't deplete entropy more than happens now. Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <kees.cook@canonical.com> Cc: Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> Cc: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> |
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