[openssl-dev] Work on a new RNG for OpenSSL

Tomas Mraz tmraz at redhat.com
Thu Aug 17 12:34:49 UTC 2017


On Thu, 2017-08-17 at 12:22 +0000, Salz, Rich via openssl-dev wrote:
> I understand the concern.  The issue I am wrestling with is strict
> compatibility with the existing code.  Does anyone really *want* the
> RNG’s to not reseed on fork?  It’s hard to imagine, but maybe
> somewhere someone is.  And then it’s not about just reseeding, but
> what about when (if) we add other things, like whether or not the
> secure arena gets zero’d in a child?
> 
> So let me phrase it this way:  does anyone object to changing the
> default so NO_ATFORK must be used to avoid the reseeding and other
> things we might add later?

I can hardly see anyone would be broken if the default is to reseed
RNG on fork. However that might not be true for other atfork
functionalities so perhaps there is a need to make each of these future
atfork functions configurable and either on or off by default
individually and not as a whole.


>     By the way I noticed that openssl_init_fork_handlers() is not
> guarded by
>     RUN_ONCE(). This should be fixed, too.
>     
> Yeah, I’ll fix that; thanks.
> 
-- 
Tomáš Mráz
Red Hat

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