arc4random (was Re: Remove add-ons mechanism)

[Zack Weinberg <zackw at panix dot com>]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 7:04 AM, Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 09/29/2017 12:01 AM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> I don't disagree with this patch exactly, but I was thinking of using
>> the add-ons mechanism to prototype a CSPRNG addition to glibc
>
> I've got something towards an implementation of arc4random (not certifiable,
> but it should be unpredictable in practice).

I'm delighted to hear that, and please let me know if i can help in
any way.  I don't have a whole lot of time toward libc hacking this
cycle but I would really like to see it done this cycle, so I'll find
the time. :)

> I think I found a way to do full fork protection even without
> MADV_WIPEONFORK, using a global counter in a MAP_SHARED segment. Reseeding
> is still needed to deal with a counter overflow on 32-bit architectures, and
> there is some overhead by the globally shared counter, but I think it is
> superior to all approaches I've seen so far (and it does not require a fork
> handler or a system call for every random number generation).

Is the idea that after a fork, processes may share RNG state but they
see each others' counter increments so they won't return the same
random bits from paired calls?  Kind of like how it would work for
multiple threads with a shared but atomically accessed RNG state?

zw