From: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
To: Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>,
Bernard Normier <bernard@zeroc.com>,
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Subject: Re: Concurrent access to /dev/urandom
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 12:33:17 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20041211173317.GA28382@thunk.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0412101821330.2173@gradall.private.brainfood.com>
On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 06:22:37PM -0600, Adam Heath wrote:
>
> Actually, I think this is a security issue. Since any plain old program can
> read from /dev/urandom at any time, an attacker could attempt to read from
> that device at the same moment some other program is doing so, and thereby
> gain some knowledge as to the other program's state.
It could be a potential exploit, but....
(a) it only applies on SMP machines
(b) it's not a remote exploit; the attacker needs to have
the ability to run arbitrary programs on the local
machine
(c) the attacker won't get all of other programs' reads of
/dev/urandom, and
(d) the attacker would have to have a program continuously
reading from /dev/urandom, which would take up enough
CPU time that it would be rather hard to hide.
That's not to say that we shouldn't fix it at our earliest
convenience, and I'd urge Andrew to push this to Linus for 2.6.10 ---
but I don't think we need to move heaven and earth to try to
accelerate the 2.6.10 release process, either.
- Ted
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2004-12-11 17:33 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 39+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2004-11-27 20:45 Concurrent access to /dev/urandom Bernard Normier
2004-11-27 20:56 ` Jan Engelhardt
2004-11-27 21:15 ` Bernard Normier
2004-11-27 21:22 ` Jan Engelhardt
2004-11-28 20:58 ` Bernard Normier
2004-12-07 23:41 ` Bernard Normier
2004-12-08 1:28 ` Theodore Ts'o
2004-12-08 1:56 ` Bernard Normier
2004-12-08 19:21 ` Theodore Ts'o
2004-12-08 20:15 ` Bernard Normier
2004-12-08 21:56 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-09 1:57 ` Theodore Ts'o
2004-12-09 2:46 ` andyliu
2004-12-09 4:55 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-09 2:58 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-09 21:29 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-10 4:47 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-10 16:35 ` Theodore Ts'o
2004-12-10 18:28 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-10 21:28 ` Theodore Ts'o
2004-12-10 22:23 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-11 0:22 ` Adam Heath
2004-12-11 1:10 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-11 17:33 ` Theodore Ts'o [this message]
2004-12-11 19:58 ` Adam Heath
2004-12-11 20:40 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-12 16:19 ` Pavel Machek
2004-12-11 0:19 ` Adam Heath
2004-12-09 3:10 ` David Lang
2004-12-09 4:52 ` Matt Mackall
2004-12-09 6:36 ` Theodore Ts'o
2004-11-29 22:47 ` Jon Masters
2004-11-29 23:14 ` Bernard Normier
2004-11-29 23:43 ` Sven-Haegar Koch
2004-11-30 2:31 ` David Schwartz
2004-11-30 4:14 ` Kyle Moffett
2004-11-30 8:23 ` Jan Engelhardt
2004-11-30 18:50 ` David Schwartz
2004-11-29 23:42 ` David Wagner
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