Re: Handling of entropy during boot
On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 09:46:42PM +0100, Stefan Fritsch wrote:
>
> There is a random seed file stored by systemd-random-seed.service that saves
> entropy from one boot and loads it again after the next reboot. The random
> seed file is re-written immediately after the file is read, so the system not
> properly shutting down won't cause the same seed file to be used again. The
> problem is that systemd (and probably /etc/init.d/urandom, too) does not set
> the flag that allows the kernel to credit the randomness and so the kernel does
> not know about the entropy contained in that file. Systemd upstream argues that
> this is supposed to protect against the same OS image being used many times
> [3]. (More links to more discussion can be found at [4]).
This is an issue which Debian should be deciding more than systemd,
since the issues involved involve how the entire OS is packaged and
installed. That being said, the issues involved are subtle.
The decision to not credit any randomness for the contents of
/var/lib/systemd/random-seed is definitely the conservative thing to
do. One of the issues is indeed what happens if the OS image gets
reused. And it's not just for Virtual Machines, but it can also be an
issue any time an image is cloned --- for example, in some kind of
consumer electronic device. Another question is that has to be
considered is whether you trust that random-seed file hasn't been
tampered with or read between it was written and when the system is
next booted. For example, if the "Targetted Access Organization" at
NSA, or its equivalent at German BND, or Chinese MSS, etc., were to
intercept a specific device, and read the random-seed file, they
wouldn't need to make any changes to the devices (which might, after
all, be detectable). If the OS were to blindly trust the random-seed
file as having entropy that can't be guessed by an adversary, this
kind of attack becomes possible.
Now, should Debian care about this particular attack? I suspect
people of good will could very well disagree. There is a similar
issue with newer kernels which support the boot-command-line option
random.trust_cpu=on. If you are firmly convinced that there is a good
chance that the NSA has suborned Intel in putting a backdoor into
RDRAND, you won't want to use that boot option. But from the
perspective of the distro, especially one who is striving to be a
"Universal OS", how should you set this default?
If the kernel is only going to be used by a VM, you have to trust the
Host OS provider, and if you're paranoid enough that you doubt Intel's
ability to resist being suborned by the NSA, you're probably going to
be even more concerned of the hosting/cloud provider from being in bed
with the its local government authorities. So what the default should
be for Google's "Cloud Optimized OS" is pretty obvious. The COS
kernel trusts RDRAND, and this avoids any delays in the boot process
waiting for the random number to be securely initialized --- because
we trust RDRAND.
But for the Universal OS, it answer of whether we should blindly trust
the random-seed or RDRAND is not so easy. I can construct scenarios
where we should obviously trust random-seed --- and scenarios where we
shouldn't. And we could throw it up to the user, and ask them to
answer a question at installation time --- but most users probably
won't be equipped to be able to answer the question with full
understanding of the consequencs one way or another.
That being said, there are some thing we can do that can help
regardless of what the default ends up being, and how we enable users
or image installers to change the default. For example, at least
every day, or perhaps sooner (and maybe once an hour if the device is
powered by the AC mains) the contents of the random-seed file should
be refreshed. The reason for that is that if the system has been up
for weeks or month, and the user reboots the system by forcing power
down or if the kernel crashes, or if the user is in too much of a
hurry to wait for a clean shutdown sequence, and runs something like
"echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger", there is an increased chance that the
random-seed file may have been snooped sometime in the past
week/month/quarter.
> A refinement of the random seed handling could be to check if the hostname/
> virtual machine-id is the same when saving the seed, and only credit the
> entropy if it is unchanged since the last boot.
This is a good idea, but.... how you set the virtual machine-id is
very cloud/hosting provider specific. Also, very often, in many cloud
environments, the hostname is not set until after the network is
brought up, since they end up querying the hostname for the VM via the
metadata server.
Also, for a kernel meant for a virtualization or cloud environment, my
recommendation is to use random.trust_cpu=on, or compile the kernel
with CONFIG_RANDOM_TRUST_CPU, which sets random.trust_cpu to be
defaulted to on. Trusting RDRAND in a virtual environment is probably
right thing to do. And of course, if systemd mixes in the random-seed
file, using that as a belt-and-suspenders approach is fine thing.
Cheers,
- Ted
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