tjh.dev
random: introduce getrandom(2) system call
The getrandom(2) system call was requested by the LibreSSL Portable
developers. It is analoguous to the getentropy(2) system call in
OpenBSD.
The rationale of this system call is to provide resiliance against
file descriptor exhaustion attacks, where the attacker consumes all
available file descriptors, forcing the use of the fallback code where
/dev/[u]random is not available. Since the fallback code is often not
well-tested, it is better to eliminate this potential failure mode
entirely.
The other feature provided by this new system call is the ability to
request randomness from the /dev/urandom entropy pool, but to block
until at least 128 bits of entropy has been accumulated in the
/dev/urandom entropy pool. Historically, the emphasis in the
/dev/urandom development has been to ensure that urandom pool is
initialized as quickly as possible after system boot, and preferably
before the init scripts start execution.
This is because changing /dev/urandom reads to block represents an
interface change that could potentially break userspace which is not
acceptable. In practice, on most x86 desktop and server systems, in
general the entropy pool can be initialized before it is needed (and
in modern kernels, we will printk a warning message if not). However,
on an embedded system, this may not be the case. And so with this new
interface, we can provide the functionality of blocking until the
urandom pool has been initialized. Any userspace program which uses
this new functionality must take care to assure that if it is used
during the boot process, that it will not cause the init scripts or
other portions of the system startup to hang indefinitely.
SYNOPSIS
#include <linux/random.h>
int getrandom(void *buf, size_t buflen, unsigned int flags);
DESCRIPTION
The system call getrandom() fills the buffer pointed to by buf
with up to buflen random bytes which can be used to seed user
space random number generators (i.e., DRBG's) or for other
cryptographic uses. It should not be used for Monte Carlo
simulations or other programs/algorithms which are doing
probabilistic sampling.
If the GRND_RANDOM flags bit is set, then draw from the
/dev/random pool instead of the /dev/urandom pool. The
/dev/random pool is limited based on the entropy that can be
obtained from environmental noise, so if there is insufficient
entropy, the requested number of bytes may not be returned.
If there is no entropy available at all, getrandom(2) will
either block, or return an error with errno set to EAGAIN if
the GRND_NONBLOCK bit is set in flags.
If the GRND_RANDOM bit is not set, then the /dev/urandom pool
will be used. Unlike using read(2) to fetch data from
/dev/urandom, if the urandom pool has not been sufficiently
initialized, getrandom(2) will block (or return -1 with the
errno set to EAGAIN if the GRND_NONBLOCK bit is set in flags).
The getentropy(2) system call in OpenBSD can be emulated using
the following function:
int getentropy(void *buf, size_t buflen)
{
int ret;
if (buflen > 256)
goto failure;
ret = getrandom(buf, buflen, 0);
if (ret < 0)
return ret;
if (ret == buflen)
return 0;
failure:
errno = EIO;
return -1;
}
RETURN VALUE
On success, the number of bytes that was filled in the buf is
returned. This may not be all the bytes requested by the
caller via buflen if insufficient entropy was present in the
/dev/random pool, or if the system call was interrupted by a
signal.
On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.
ERRORS
EINVAL An invalid flag was passed to getrandom(2)
EFAULT buf is outside the accessible address space.
EAGAIN The requested entropy was not available, and
getentropy(2) would have blocked if the
GRND_NONBLOCK flag was not set.
EINTR While blocked waiting for entropy, the call was
interrupted by a signal handler; see the description
of how interrupted read(2) calls on "slow" devices
are handled with and without the SA_RESTART flag
in the signal(7) man page.
NOTES
For small requests (buflen <= 256) getrandom(2) will not
return EINTR when reading from the urandom pool once the
entropy pool has been initialized, and it will return all of
the bytes that have been requested. This is the recommended
way to use getrandom(2), and is designed for compatibility
with OpenBSD's getentropy() system call.
However, if you are using GRND_RANDOM, then getrandom(2) may
block until the entropy accounting determines that sufficient
environmental noise has been gathered such that getrandom(2)
will be operating as a NRBG instead of a DRBG for those people
who are working in the NIST SP 800-90 regime. Since it may
block for a long time, these guarantees do *not* apply. The
user may want to interrupt a hanging process using a signal,
so blocking until all of the requested bytes are returned
would be unfriendly.
For this reason, the user of getrandom(2) MUST always check
the return value, in case it returns some error, or if fewer
bytes than requested was returned. In the case of
!GRND_RANDOM and small request, the latter should never
happen, but the careful userspace code (and all crypto code
should be careful) should check for this anyway!
Finally, unless you are doing long-term key generation (and
perhaps not even then), you probably shouldn't be using
GRND_RANDOM. The cryptographic algorithms used for
/dev/urandom are quite conservative, and so should be
sufficient for all purposes. The disadvantage of GRND_RANDOM
is that it can block, and the increased complexity required to
deal with partially fulfilled getrandom(2) requests.
Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Reviewed-by: Zach Brown <zab@zabbo.net>