Re: Tempfile vulnerabilities

[berendi2 () WEBDESIGN HU (Peter Berendi)]

On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, antirez wrote:
> Sure but there is another problem, while evil user exec 'cat /dev/random >
>  /dev/null &' maybe that the following results in an infinite loop:
>
> while(there_are_enougt_entropy() == 0)
>       sleep(1);
> /* race -- what if the evil user starts to deplate the entropy pool here? */
> get_entropy_from_randomdev();
>
> Can be so easy to DoS cryptographic software?

Because of this, crypto software should open /dev/random in blocking mode.

random_fd = open("/dev/random", O_RDONLY);
read(random_fd, &seed, sizeof(seed));

At least it will not stop, but progress very slowly.

I became curious, and straced my ssh client (1.2.26, debian/slink) while
running cat /dev/random >/dev/null. I saw

open("/dev/random", O_RDONLY)           = 5
fcntl(5, F_SETFL, O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK)  = 0
read(5, 0xbfffcdfc, 32)                 = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily
unavailable)

three times in the strace output, none were successful. Interesting, since
I never ran ssh as root before (now needed for strace), therefore I didn't
even have a .ssh/random_seed file. I think it should at least complain and
request confirmation.


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