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Date:      Thu, 6 Sep 2012 07:27:34 +1000
From:      Peter Jeremy <peter@rulingia.com>
To:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r239598 - head/etc/rc.d
Message-ID:  <20120905212734.GE2654@aspire.rulingia.com>
In-Reply-To: <20120905021248.5a17ace9@gumby.homeunix.com>
References:  <201208222337.q7MNbORo017642@svn.freebsd.org> <5043E449.8050005@FreeBSD.org> <20120904220126.GA85339@dragon.NUXI.org> <50468326.8070009@FreeBSD.org> <20120905021248.5a17ace9@gumby.homeunix.com>

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On 2012-Sep-05 02:12:48 +0100, RW <rwmaillists@googlemail.com> wrote:
>All of the low-grade entropy should go through sha256.

Overall, I like the idea of feeding the high-volume mixed quality
"entropy" through SHA-256 or similar.

>Anything written into /dev/random is passed by random_yarrow_write() 16
>Bytes at time into random_harvest_internal() which copies it into a
>buffer and queues  it up. If there are 256 buffers queued
>random_harvest_internal() simply returns without doing anything.=20

This would seem to open up a denial-of-entropy attack on random(4):
All entropy sources feed into Yarrow via random_harvest_internal()
which queues the input into a single queue - harvestfifo.  When this
queue is full, further input is discarded.  If I run
  "dd if=3D/dev/zero of=3D/dev/random"
then harvestfifo will be kept full of NULs, resulting in other entropy
events (particularly from within the kernel) being discarded.  There
would still be a small amount of entropy from the get_cyclecount()
calls but this is minimal.

Is it worth splitting harvestfifo into multiple queues to prevent
this?  At least a separate queue for RANDOM_WRITE and potentially
separate queues for each entropy source.

--=20
Peter Jeremy

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