• Jason A. Donenfeld's avatar
    random: check for signals every PAGE_SIZE chunk of /dev/[u]random · e3c1c4fd
    Jason A. Donenfeld authored
    In 1448769c ("random: check for signal_pending() outside of
    need_resched() check"), Jann pointed out that we previously were only
    checking the TIF_NOTIFY_SIGNAL and TIF_SIGPENDING flags if the process
    had TIF_NEED_RESCHED set, which meant in practice, super long reads to
    /dev/[u]random would delay signal handling by a long time. I tried this
    using the below program, and indeed I wasn't able to interrupt a
    /dev/urandom read until after several megabytes had been read. The bug
    he fixed has always been there, and so code that reads from /dev/urandom
    without checking the return value of read() has mostly worked for a long
    time, for most sizes, not just for <= 256.
    
    Maybe it makes sense to keep that code working. The reason it was so
    small prior, ignoring the fact that it didn't work anyway, was likely
    because /dev/random used to block, and that could happen for pretty
    large lengths of time while entropy was gathered. But now, it's just a
    chacha20 call, which is extremely fast and is just operating on pure
    data, without having to wait for some external event. In that sense,
    /dev/[u]random is a lot more like /dev/zero.
    
    Taking a page out of /dev/zero's read_zero() function, it always returns
    at least one chunk, and then checks for signals after each chunk. Chunk
    sizes there are of length PAGE_SIZE. Let's just copy the same thing for
    /dev/[u]random, and check for signals and cond_resched() for every
    PAGE_SIZE amount of data. This makes the behavior more consistent with
    expectations, and should mitigate the impact of Jann's fix for the
    age-old signal check bug.
    
    ---- test program ----
    
      #include <unistd.h>
      #include <signal.h>
      #include <stdio.h>
      #include <sys/random.h>
    
      static unsigned char x[~0U];
    
      static void handle(int) { }
    
      int main(int argc, char *argv[])
      {
        pid_t pid = getpid(), child;
        signal(SIGUSR1, handle);
        if (!(child = fork())) {
          for (;;)
            kill(pid, SIGUSR1);
        }
        pause();
        printf("interrupted after reading %zd bytes\n", getrandom(x, sizeof(x), 0));
        kill(child, SIGTERM);
        return 0;
      }
    
    Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
    Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
    e3c1c4fd
random.c 51.9 KB