Start up DEVRANDOM entropy improvement for older Linux devices.

Improve handling of low entropy at start up from /dev/urandom by waiting for
a read(2) call on /dev/random to succeed.  Once one such call has succeeded,
a shared memory segment is created and persisted as an indicator to other
processes that /dev/urandom is properly seeded.

This does not fully prevent against attacks weakening the entropy source.
An attacker who has control of the machine early in its boot sequence
could create the shared memory segment preventing detection of low entropy
conditions.  However, this is no worse than the current situation.

An attacker would also be capable of removing the shared memory segment
and causing seeding to reoccur resulting in a denial of service attack.
This is partially mitigated by keeping the shared memory alive for the
duration of the process's existence.  Thus, an attacker would not only need
to have called call shmctl(2) with the IPC_RMID command but the system
must subsequently enter a state where no instances of libcrypto exist in
any process.  Even one long running process will prevent this attack.

The System V shared memory calls used here go back at least as far as
Linux kernel 2.0.  Linux kernels 4.8 and later, don't have a reliable way
to detect that /dev/urandom has been properly seeded, so a failure is raised
for this case (i.e. the getentropy(2) call has already failed).

Reviewed-by: Bernd Edlinger <bernd.edlinger@hotmail.de>
(Merged from https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/9595)

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index e3131f0ef8..c5f42ecce0 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -9,6 +9,15 @@
 
  Changes between 1.1.1 and 3.0.0 [xx XXX xxxx]
 
+  *) Early start up entropy quality from the DEVRANDOM seed source has been
+     improved for older Linux systems.  The RAND subsystem will wait for
+     /dev/random to be producing output before seeding from /dev/urandom.
+     The seeded state is stored for future library initialisations using
+     a system global shared memory segment.  The shared memory identifier
+     can be configured by defining OSSL_SHM_SEEDED to the desired value.
+     The default identifier is 114.
+     [Paul Dale]
+
   *) Revised BN_generate_prime_ex to not avoid factors 2..17863 in p-1
      when primes for RSA keys are computed.
      Since we previously always generated primes == 2 (mod 3) for RSA keys,