Commit f06295b4 authored by Kees Cook's avatar Kees Cook Committed by Linus Torvalds
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ELF: implement AT_RANDOM for glibc PRNG seeding

While discussing[1] the need for glibc to have access to random bytes
during program load, it seems that an earlier attempt to implement
AT_RANDOM got stalled.  This implements a random 16 byte string, available
to every ELF program via a new auxv AT_RANDOM vector.

[1] http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2008-10/msg00006.html

Ulrich said:

glibc needs right after startup a bit of random data for internal
protections (stack canary etc).  What is now in upstream glibc is that we
always unconditionally open /dev/urandom, read some data, and use it.  For
every process startup.  That's slow.

...

The solution is to provide a limited amount of random data to the
starting process in the aux vector.  I suggested 16 bytes and this is
what the patch implements.  If we need only 16 bytes or less we use the
data directly.  If we need more we'll use the 16 bytes to see a PRNG.
This avoids the costly /dev/urandom use and it allows the kernel to use
the most adequate so...
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