Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 11 Dec 2004 13:58:45 -0600 (CST) | From | Adam Heath <> | Subject | Re: Concurrent access to /dev/urandom |
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On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 06:22:37PM -0600, Adam Heath wrote: > > > > Actually, I think this is a security issue. Since any plain old program can > > read from /dev/urandom at any time, an attacker could attempt to read from > > that device at the same moment some other program is doing so, and thereby > > gain some knowledge as to the other program's state. > > It could be a potential exploit, but.... > > (a) it only applies on SMP machines > (b) it's not a remote exploit; the attacker needs to have > the ability to run arbitrary programs on the local > machine > (c) the attacker won't get all of other programs' reads of > /dev/urandom, and > (d) the attacker would have to have a program continuously > reading from /dev/urandom, which would take up enough > CPU time that it would be rather hard to hide. > > That's not to say that we shouldn't fix it at our earliest > convenience, and I'd urge Andrew to push this to Linus for 2.6.10 --- > but I don't think we need to move heaven and earth to try to > accelerate the 2.6.10 release process, either.
Is it a problem for other kernel versions? 2.4? Shouldn't this patch be pushed out separately to distributions? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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