Hello systemd-devel, There's an ongoing discussion @ lkml about early boot random number entropy, or the lack of it, and how it may hang systemd-using instances from booting indefinitely.
Ted Ts'o is questioning the validity of journal-authenticate's early random number usage, maybe some of you care to comment. Please find the forwarded message below. Regards, Vito Caputo ----- Forwarded message from "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <[email protected]> ----- Date: Tue, 1 May 2018 20:56:04 -0400 From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <[email protected]> To: Sultan Alsawaf <[email protected]> Cc: Justin Forbes <[email protected]>, Jeremy Cline <[email protected]>, Pavel Machek <[email protected]>, LKML <[email protected]>, Jann Horn <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Linux messages full of `random: get_random_u32 called from` User-Agent: Mutt/1.9.5 (2018-04-13) On Tue, May 01, 2018 at 05:43:17PM -0700, Sultan Alsawaf wrote: > > I've attached what I think is a reasonable stopgap solution until this is > actually fixed. If you're willing to revert the CVE-2018-1108 patches > completely, then I don't think you'll mind using this patch in the meantime. I would put it slightly differently; reverting the CVE-2018-1108 patches is less dangerous than what you are proposing in your attached patch. Again, I think the right answer is to fix userspace to not require cryptographic grade entropy during early system startup, and for people to *think* about what they are doing. I've looked at the systemd's use of hmac in journal-authenticate, and as near as I can tell, there isn't any kind of explanation about why it was necessary, or what threat it was trying to protect against. - Ted ----- End forwarded message ----- _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
