Re: Does /dev/urandom now block until initialised ?

[Ken Moffat]

On 23 July 2018 at 16:16, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 04:43:01AM +0100, Ken Moffat wrote:
>>
>> Did that, no change.  Ran strace from the bootscript, confirmed that
>> only /dev/urandom was being used, and that it seemed to be blocking.
>
> Nope, /dev/urandom still doesn't block.  Are you sure it isn't caused
> by something calling getrandom(2) --- which *will* block?

I'm not at all sure, which was why I asked.
>
> We intentionally left /dev/urandom non-blocking, because of backwards
> compatibility.
>
>> BUT: I'm not sure if I've correctly understood what is happening.
>> It seems to me that the fix for CVE-2018-1108 (4.17-rc1, 4.16.4)
>> means /dev/urandom will now block until fully initialised.
>>
>> Is that correct and intentional ?
>
> No, that's not right.  What the fix does is more accurately account
> for the entropy accounting before getrandom(2) would become
> non-blocking.  There were a bunch of things we were doing wrong,
> including assuming that 100% of the bytes being sent via
> add_device_entropy() were random --- when some of the things that were
> feeding into it was the (fixed) information you would get from running
> dmidecode (e.g., the fixed results from the BIOS configuration data).
>
> Some of those bytes might not be known to an external adversary (such
> as your CPU mainboard's serial number), but it's not exactly *Secret*.
>
>> If so, to get the affected desktop machines to boot I seem to have
>> some choices...
>
> Well, this probably isn't going to be popular, but the other thing
> that might help is you could switch distro's.  I'm guessing you run a
> Red Hat distro, probably Fedora, right?
>

Wrong, linuxfromscratch (sysv version) and beyond linuxfromscratch
plus extras such as chronyd. The only initrd is on the haswell, and just
for intel microcode.

> The problem which most people are seeing turns out to be a terrible
> interaction between dracut-fips, systemd and a Red Hat specific patch
> to libgcrypt for FIPS/FEDRAMP compliance:
>
> https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/libgcrypt/blob/master/f/libgcrypt-1.6.2-fips-ctor.patch#_23
>
> Uninstalling dracut-fips and recreating the initramfs might also help.
>
> One of the reasons why I didn't see the problem when I was developing
> the remediation patch for CVE-2018-1108 is because I run Debian
> testing, which doesn't have this particular Red Hat patch.
>
>> The latter certainly lets it boot in a reasonable time, but people
>> who understand this seem to regard it as untrustworthy.  For users
>> of /dev/urandom that is no big deal, but does it not mean that the
>> values from /dev/random will be similarly untrustworthy and
>> therefore I should not use this machine for generating long-lived
>> secure keys ?
>
> This really depends on how paranoid / careful you are.  Remember, your
> keyboard controller was almost certainly built in Shenzhen, China, and
> Matt Blaze published a paper on the Jitterbug in 2006:
>
>         http://www.crypto.com/papers/jbug-Usenix06-final.pdf
>
> In practice, after 30 minutes of operation, especially if you are
> using the keyboard, the entropy pool *will* be sufficiently
> randomized, whether or not it was sufficientl randomized at boot.  The
> real danger of CVE-2018-1108 was always long-term keys generated at
> first boot.  That was the problem that was discussed in the "Mining
> your p's and q's: Detection of Widespread Weak Keys in Network
> Devices" (see https://factorable.net).
>
> So generating long-lived keys means (a) you need to be sure you trust
> all of the software on the system --- some very paranoid people such
> as Bruce Schneier used a freshly installed machine from CD-ROM that
> was never attached to the network before examining materials from
> Edward Snowden, and (b) making sure the entropy pool is initialized.
>
> Remember we are constantly feeding input from the hardware sources
> into the entropy pool; it doesn't stop the moment we think the entropy
> pool is initialized.  And you can always mix extra "stuff" into the
> entropy pool by echoing the results of say, taking series of dice
> rolls, aond sending it via the "cat" or "echo" command into
> /dev/urhandom.
>
> So it should be possible to use the machine for generated long lived
> keys; you might just need to be a bit more careful before you do it.
> It's really keys generated automatically at boot that are most at risk
> --- and you can always regenerate the host SSH keys after a fresh
> install.  In fact, what I have done in the past when I first login to
> a freshly created Cloud VM system is to run command like "dd
> if=/dev/urandom count=1 bs=256 | od -x", then login to VM, and then
> run "cat > /dev/urandom", and cut and paste the results of the od -x
> output into the guest VM, to better initialize the entropy pool on the
> VM before regenerating the host SSH keys.
>
> Cheers,
>
>                                         - Ted

Thanks. In that case I'll go with the simple fix (haveged).

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