[Buildroot] [PATCH] package/urandom-scripts: hash old seed with new seed when saving

["Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@zx2c4.com>]

Writing into /dev/urandom doesn't actually credit any entropy bits. And
while it adds that data to the entropy pool, it won't actually be
immediately used when reading from /dev/urandom subsequently. This is
how the kernel's /dev/urandom has always worked, unfortunately.

As a result of this behavior, which may be understandably surprising to
you, writing a good seed file into /dev/urandom and then saving a new
seed file immediately after is dangerous, because the new seed file may
wind up being entirely deterministic, even if the old seed file was
quite good.

I fixed this in systemd with
<https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/da2862ef06f22fc8d31dafced6d2d6dc14f2ee0b>,
and fortunately it's possible to do the same thing in shell script here.
Specifically, instead of just saving new /dev/urandom output straight
up, we hash the new /dev/urandom together with the old seed, in order to
produce the new seed. This way the amount of entropy in the new seed
will stay the same or get better, but not appreciably regress.

At the same time, the pool size check in this script is useless. Writing
to /dev/urandom never credits bits anyway, so no matter what, writing
into /dev/urandom is useful and not harmful. There's also not much of a
point in seeding with more than 256 bits, which is what the hashing
operation above produces. So this commit removes the file size check.

As a final note, while this commit improves upon the status quo by
removing a vulnerability, this shell script still does not actually
initialize the RNG like it says it does. For initialization via a seed
file, the RNDADDENTROPY ioctl must be used.

Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
---
 package/urandom-scripts/S20urandom | 30 +++++++++++-------------------
 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)

diff --git a/package/urandom-scripts/S20urandom b/package/urandom-scripts/S20urandom
index e4fd125721..f971ea905a 100644
--- a/package/urandom-scripts/S20urandom
+++ b/package/urandom-scripts/S20urandom
@@ -17,26 +17,16 @@ else
 	pool_size=512
 fi
 
-check_file_size() {
-	[ -f "$URANDOM_SEED" ] || return 1
-	# Try to read two blocks but exactly one will be read if the file has
-	# the correct size.
-	size=$(dd if="$URANDOM_SEED" bs="$pool_size" count=2 2> /dev/null | wc -c)
-	test "$size" -eq "$pool_size"
-}
-
 init_rng() {
-	if check_file_size; then
-		printf 'Initializing random number generator: '
-		dd if="$URANDOM_SEED" bs="$pool_size" of=/dev/urandom count=1 2> /dev/null
-		status=$?
-		if [ "$status" -eq 0 ]; then
-			echo "OK"
-		else
-			echo "FAIL"
-		fi
-		return "$status"
+	printf 'Initializing random number generator: '
+	dd if="$URANDOM_SEED" bs="$pool_size" of=/dev/urandom count=1 2> /dev/null
+	status=$?
+	if [ "$status" -eq 0 ]; then
+		echo "OK"
+	else
+		echo "FAIL"
 	fi
+	return "$status"
 }
 
 save_random_seed() {
@@ -44,7 +34,9 @@ save_random_seed() {
 	if touch "$URANDOM_SEED" 2> /dev/null; then
 		old_umask=$(umask)
 		umask 077
-		dd if=/dev/urandom of="$URANDOM_SEED" bs="$pool_size" count=1 2> /dev/null
+		dd if=/dev/urandom of="$URANDOM_SEED.new" bs="$pool_size" count=1 2> /dev/null
+		cat "$URANDOM_SEED" "$URANDOM_SEED.new" 2>/dev/null | sha256sum | cut -d ' ' -f 1 > "$URANDOM_SEED"
+		rm "$URANDOM_SEED.new"
 		status=$?
 		umask "$old_umask"
 		if [ "$status" -eq 0 ]; then
-- 
2.35.1

_______________________________________________
buildroot mailing list
buildroot@buildroot.org
https://lists.buildroot.org/mailman/listinfo/buildroot