From owner-freebsd-current Fri Apr 21 0:24:32 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from freefall.freebsd.org (freefall.FreeBSD.ORG [204.216.27.21]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 716A337B8A4 for ; Fri, 21 Apr 2000 00:24:30 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) Received: from localhost (kris@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.9.3/8.9.2) with ESMTP id AAA78672 for ; Fri, 21 Apr 2000 00:21:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) X-Authentication-Warning: freefall.freebsd.org: kris owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 00:21:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Kris Kennaway To: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: HEADS UP: Alpha OpenSSH/OpenSSL breakage In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 20 Apr 2000, Kris Kennaway wrote: > I've tracked down what seems to be a bug in the new version of OpenSSL I > imported a week ago which affects the alpha platform. It *looks* like a > bug in OpenSSL's "bignum" library which might not have shown up for users > of the default openssl distribution, which uses assembly to implement > (parts of) bignum on alpha. We don't currently use asm on either platform > (i386 or alpha) because of a lack of support for a target "CPU revision" > (e.g. i[3456]86) during make world. This turns out to have been a bad guess: OpenSSL don't even use asm on alpha for some reason, although they have the .s files there. The actual bug here is that FreeBSD/Alpha doesn't support /dev/random, and OpenSSL-0.9.5a is more stringent about having good-quality random input than 0.9.4 was. When OpenSSH tries to generate an RSA key it cant get the randomness it wants at a lower level in the library, and the operation fails. I'm looking at how this can be worked around, but obviously the real fix is to get /dev/[u]random support working on alpha ASAP - this is a serious omission. Any takers? Kris ---- In God we Trust -- all others must submit an X.509 certificate. -- Charles Forsythe To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message