Re: [PATCH v1] random: block in /dev/urandom

Theodore Ts'o
2022-02-23T17:57:17Z

On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 06:02:52PM +0100, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
>
> I think your analysis is a bit mismatched from the reality of the
> situation. That reality is that cryptographic users still find
> themselves using /dev/urandom, as that's been the "standard good
> advice" for a very long time. And people are still encouraged to do
> that, either out of ignorance or out of "compatibility". The
> cryptographic problem is not going away.

Or they open /dev/urandom because getrandom() and getentropy() isn't
available on some OS's (all the world is not Linux, despite what the
systemd folks like to believe), and some other OS's have a
/dev/urandom-like device that they can open, and so it's just more
convenient for application programers to open and read from
/dev/urandom.

> Fixing this issue means, yes, adding a 1 second delay to the small
> group of init system users who haven't switched to using
> getrandom(GRND_INSECURE) for that less common usage (who even are
> those users actually?). That's not breaking compatibility or breaking
> userspace or breaking anything; that's accepting the reality of _how_
> /dev/urandom is mostly used -- for crypto -- and making that usage
> finally secure, at the expense of a 1 second delay for those other
> users who haven't switched to getrandom(GRND_INSECURE) yet. That seems
> like a _very_ small price to pay for eliminating a footgun.

I agree. So long as we're only blocking for short amount of time, and
only during early after the system was booted, people shouldn't care.
The reason why we had to add the "gee-I-hope-this-jitterentropy-like-
hack-is-actually-secure on all architectures but it's better than the
alternatives people were trying to get Linus to adopt" was because
there were systems were hanging for hours or days.

- Ted