Re: [PATCH v2] crypto: sun4i-ss - clamp PRNG seed length to prevent heap overflow

From: Eric Biggers

Date: Fri May 29 2026 - 15:42:05 EST


On Fri, May 29, 2026 at 05:33:41PM +0000, Eric Biggers wrote:
> On Fri, May 29, 2026 at 07:10:06PM +0200, Corentin Labbe wrote:
> > Le Fri, May 29, 2026 at 09:10:57AM -0700, Eric Biggers a écrit :
> > > On Fri, May 29, 2026 at 08:08:01AM +0000, Tianchu Chen wrote:
> > > > From: Tianchu Chen <flynnnchen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> > > >
> > > > sun4i_ss_prng_seed() copies the user-supplied seed into ss->seed
> > > > using the user-provided length with no bounds check. The crypto core
> > > > does not enforce slen <= seedsize before calling into the driver, so a
> > > > userspace caller via AF_ALG setsockopt(ALG_SET_KEY) can pass up to
> > > > sysctl_optmem_max bytes, overflowing the fixed-size buffer and
> > > > corrupting adjacent heap memory.
> > > >
> > > > Clamp the copy length to the buffer size, matching the approach used by
> > > > loongson-rng for oversized seeds.
> > > >
> > > > Discovered by Atuin - Automated Vulnerability Discovery Engine.
> > > >
> > > > Fixes: 6298e948215f ("crypto: sunxi-ss - Add Allwinner Security System crypto accelerator")
> > > > Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > > > Signed-off-by: Tianchu Chen <flynnnchen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> > > > ---
> > > > v2: Silently clamp oversized seeds with min_t instead of returning
> > > > -EINVAL (Herbert Xu).
> > >
> > > sun4i-ss-prng.c is useless, is still broken, and should just be deleted.
> >
> > Hello
> >
> > useless ? clearly no, it helped a lot on devices where it is.
>
> The only way this code is reachable is via "rng" algorithm type in
> AF_ALG, which is almost never used. Everyone just uses the regular
> Linux RNG (/dev/random etc) instead, as they should.
>
> In fact, anyone were to accidentally use this it would be a security
> vulnerability, seeing as sun4i_ss_prng_generate() doesn't actually fill
> in all the bytes that were requested. It also doesn't wait for the FIFO
> to be ready when reading data from it.
>
> Is it possible that there's a misunderstanding here and you think this
> provides entropy to the regular Linux RNG? It doesn't. hwrng does
> that, crypto_rng does not.
>
> The correct fix is to mark CRYPTO_DEV_SUN8I_CE_PRNG as BROKEN or remove
> it entirely. Doing otherwise is not responsible.

Looking into it a bit more, just removing CRYPTO_DEV_SUN4I_SS_PRNG is
clearly the way to go. This patch does it:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/20260529193648.18172-1-ebiggers@xxxxxxxxxx

- Eric