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
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