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

[Paul Kehrer]

On August 19, 2017 at 2:48:19 AM, Salz, Rich via openssl-dev (
openssl-dev at openssl.org) wrote:


I think the safest thing is for us to not change the default. Programs that
know they are going to fork can do the right/safe thing. It would be nicer
if we could automatically always do the right thing, but I don’t think it’s
possible.


It appears the current position is that since there will be edge cases
where a reseed would fail (thus either halting the RNG or silently not
reseeding it) that we should not attempt to reseed? I would argue it is
better to attempt to reseed and document that edge cases may need to reseed
themselves. This dramatically narrows the window from "everybody needs to
do it" to "users in certain scenarios that are becoming rarer by the day
need to do it". Given that backwards compatibility is a concern maybe
failure to reseed on fork should only drop an error on the child process's
error queue though? That behavior could potentially be a separate flag that
OpenSSL uses by default (OPENSSL_TRY_TO_INIT_ATFORK), and then
OPENSSL_INIT_ATFORK can be more strict about reseed failures if desired.

-Paul
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mta.openssl.org/pipermail/openssl-dev/attachments/20170823/8f227038/attachment-0001.html>