This is basically the same as reading from /dev/urandom on supported
systems, only it has a limit of 256 bytes per call, and does not require
an open file descriptor (so it can be used in chroots, when resource
limits are in place, or are otherwise exhausted).
It's functionally equivalent to the comparable function getentropy(),
but has been around for longer. It's actually used to implement
getentropy in FreeBSD's libc. Discussions about adding getrandom or
getentropy to NetBSD are still ongoing.
It's present in all supported versions of FreeBSD and NetBSD.
It's not present in DragonFly or OpenBSD.
Documentation: https://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?sysctl+7
Comparable code in OpenSSL:
ddec332f32/crypto/rand/rand_unix.c (L208)
Signed-off-by: nia <nia@netbsd.org>
This commit fixes issue #1212 related to platform-specific entropy
polling in an syscall-emulated environment.
Previously, the implementation of the entropy gathering function
`mbedtls_platform_entropy_poll()` for linux machines used the
following logic to determine how to obtain entropy from the kernel:
1. If the getrandom() system call identifier SYS_getrandom is present and
the kernel version is 3.17 or higher, use syscall( SYS_getrandom, ... )
2. Otherwise, fall back to reading from /dev/random.
There are two issues with this:
1. Portability:
When cross-compiling the code for a different
architecture and running it through system call
emulation in qemu, qemu reports the host kernel
version through uname but, as of v.2.5.0,
doesn't support emulating the getrandom() syscall.
This leads to `mbedtls_platform_entropy_poll()`
failing even though reading from /dev/random would
have worked.
2. Style:
Extracting the linux kernel version from
the output of `uname` is slightly tedious.
This commit fixes both by implementing the suggestion in #1212:
- It removes the kernel-version detection through uname().
- Instead, it checks whether `syscall( SYS_getrandom, ... )`
fails with errno set to ENOSYS indicating an unknown system call.
If so, it falls through to trying to read from /dev/random.
Fixes#1212.
When MBEDTLS_TIMING_C was not defined in config.h, but the MemSan
memory sanitizer was activated, entropy_poll.c used memset without
declaring it. Fix this by including string.h unconditionally.
Add a switch that turns entropy collecting off entirely, but enables
mbed TLS to run in an entirely unsafe mode. Enables to test mbed TLS
on platforms that don't have their entropy sources integrated yet.
Previously it was failing with errors about headers not found, which is
suboptimal in terms of clarity. Now give a clean error with pointer to the
documentation.
Do the checks in the .c files rather than check_config.h as it keeps them
closer to the platform-specific implementations.
Due to the recent change about entropy sources strength, it is no longer
acceptable to just disable the platform source. So, instead "fix" it so that
it is clear to MemSan that memory is initialized.
I tried __attribute__((no_sanitize_memory)) and MemSan's blacklist file, but
couldn't seem to get them to work.
