[124242] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: The perils of security tools
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alexander Klimov)
Thu May 22 14:43:36 2008
Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 19:25:42 +0300 (IDT)
From: Alexander Klimov <alserkli@inbox.ru>
To: Cryptography <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
In-Reply-To: <p0624081fc451f90ab418@[10.20.30.162]>
On Thu, 15 May 2008, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> The bigger picture is that distributions who are doing local mods
> should really have an ongoing conversation with the software's
> developers. Even if the developers don't want to talk to you, a
> one-way conversation of "we're doing this, we're doing that" could be
> useful.
Apparently, there was even a "two-way" communication about the
issue in openssl-dev [1]
The code in question that has the problem are the following
2 pieces of code in crypto/rand/md_rand.c:
247:
MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
467:
#ifndef PURIFY
MD_Update(&m,buf,j); /* purify complains */
#endif
[...]
What I currently see as best option is to actually comment out
those 2 lines of code. But I have no idea what effect this
really has on the RNG. The only effect I see is that the pool
might receive less entropy. But on the other hand, I'm not
even sure how much entropy some unitialised data has.
What do you people think about removing those 2 lines of code?
but I guess nobody on the openssl side was bothered to check
exactly what code Kurt was talking about and thus a potential
ROTFL moment turns out to be a security disaster.
[1] Random number generator, uninitialised data and valgrind
<http://www.mail-archive.com/openssl-dev@openssl.org/msg21156.html>
--
Regards,
ASK
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