[PATCH] urandom-seed: use seedrng for seeding the random number generator

Jason A. Donenfeld Jason at zx2c4.com
Mon Mar 28 10:03:59 PDT 2022


Hey Etienne,

On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 10:19 AM Etienne Champetier
<champetier.etienne at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All, Jason,
>
> @Petr Štetiar this merge was a bit too fast to get reviews ...
> Some comments inline

We can apply fixups on top, no big deal.

> When urandom-seed was introduced in 2016 it was decided during review
> that writing on each boot might cause too much wear to the flash.
> Maybe we can say that 6 years later this is not a problem anymore, but
> would love to have more devs comment
> Old thread: https://www.mail-archive.com/lede-dev@lists.infradead.org/msg01225.html
>
> Now if I understand correctly, with this patch we are writing a seed
> to flash twice per boot, in preinit/81_urandom_seed and in
> init.d/urandom_seed.
> Also there are good chances we will never have a seed.credit at all on
> many devices,
> would be great if seedrng had an option "writeseed" that blocks on getrandom().

Oh that's an interesting set of considerations and it's possible I
didn't understand some aspect of this. Most OSes should call seedrng
once at boot and once at shutdown. It's also fine to call seedrng at
any other specific time during runtime too. Because it's involved with
crediting, it always always removes the seed file after reading but
before using, and after it's used, it immediately writes a new seed
file.

It sounds like what you might want here is, perhaps, the original
behavior? Namely, the seed is never credited, but it never changes
either? That won't help you initialize the RNG, but since you're not
crediting it, you can argue that all new rng inputs are good inputs,
even if they've been used before.

So these are the two schemes to choose from:

1) read seed into memory, delete seed from disk, write into rng &
credit if good seed, write new seed to disk; repeat at shutdown/some
other time
2) read seed into memory, write into rng w/o crediting, re-use the
same seed next boot

If the second scheme is what you prefer, then your original bug report
suggesting this was an issue for OpenWRT might not really be so, and
we can just go back to what we were doing before. OTOH, if you want to
have a good mechanism that actually initializes the RNG, perhaps we
can move forward with some tweaks to seedrng.

>
> > +
> > +#define SEED_DIR "/etc/seedrng"
>
> If we worry about seed reuse, we should not use /etc as it can be
> restored from a backup

Indeed you're right. Most other distros use /var/lib/seedrng; is
/var/lib available on OpenWRT? Is there a different place for it that
would be good?

Jason



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