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Date:   Sun, 15 Sep 2019 12:55:39 +0200
From:   "Ahmed S. Darwish" <darwish.07@gmail.com>
To:     Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
Cc:     Lennart Poettering <mzxreary@0pointer.de>,
        "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        "Alexander E. Patrakov" <patrakov@gmail.com>,
        Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>,
        Andreas Dilger <adilger.kernel@dilger.ca>,
        Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>, Ray Strode <rstrode@redhat.com>,
        William Jon McCann <mccann@jhu.edu>,
        zhangjs <zachary@baishancloud.com>, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org,
        lkml <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC v3] random: getrandom(2): optionally block when CRNG
 is uninitialized
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On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 12:40:27PM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 12:02:01PM +0200, Ahmed S. Darwish wrote:
> > On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 11:30:57AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > > On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 10:59:07AM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
[...]
> > > > If Linux lets all that stuff run with awful entropy then
> > > > you pretend things where secure while they actually aren't. It's much
> > > > better to fail loudly in that case, I am sure.
> > > 
> > > This is precisely what this change permits : fail instead of block
> > > by default, and let applications decide based on the use case.
> > >
> > 
> > Unfortunately, not exactly.
> > 
> > Linus didn't want getrandom to return an error code / "to fail" in
> > that case, but to silently return CRNG-uninitialized /dev/urandom
> > data, to avoid user-space even working around the error code through
> > busy-loops.
> 
> But with this EINVAL you have the information that it only filled
> the buffer with whatever it could, right ? At least that was the
> last point I manage to catch in the discussion. Otherwise if it's
> totally silent, I fear that it will reintroduce the problem in a
> different form (i.e. libc will say "our randoms are not reliable
> anymore, let us work around this and produce blocking, solid randoms
> again to help all our users").
>

V1 of the patch I posted did indeed return -EINVAL. Linus then
suggested that this might make still some user-space act smart and
just busy-loop around that, basically blocking the boot again:

    https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAHk-=wiB0e_uGpidYHf+dV4eeT+XmG-+rQBx=JJ110R48QFFWw@mail.gmail.com
    https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAHk-=whSbo=dBiqozLoa6TFmMgbeB8d9krXXvXBKtpRWkG0rMQ@mail.gmail.com

So it was then requested to actually return what /dev/urandom would
return, so that user-space has no way whatsoever in knowing if
getrandom has failed. Then, it's the job of system integratos / BSP
builders to fix the inspect the big fat WARN on the kernel and fix
that.

This is the core of Lennart's critqueue of V3 above.

> > I understand the rationale behind that, of course, and this is what
> > I've done so far in the V3 RFC.
> > 
> > Nonetheless, this _will_, for example, make systemd-random-seed(8)
> > save week seeds under /var/lib/systemd/random-seed, since the kernel
> > didn't inform it about such weakness at all..
> 
> Then I am confused because I understood that the goal was to return
> EINVAL or anything equivalent in which case the userspace knows what
> it has to deal with :-/
>

Yeah, the discussion moved a bit beyond that.

thanks,
--darwi