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Linux/Android: Read a byte from /dev/random
instead of polling it.
#449
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I think this sounds reasonable, but do we have any documentation or examples of sandboxes which have this issue? It's not obvious to me that
read
-ing from an open file descriptor would be better or worse thanpoll
-ing orselect
-ing it.The reason for the current implementation (discussed in #58 and briansmith/ring#558 (comment)) is to avoid "debiting" a single byte from the
/dev/random
"entropy estimate". Both libsodium and openssl try to avoid this read:libsodium
always usespoll
openssl
usesselect()
by default but can be configured to useread()
Personally, I think the downside of reading one byte from the
/dev/random
pool is not that bad, and I prefer the simplicity of this approch. I just want to understand whyselect
/poll
is not a good fit in practice.There was a problem hiding this comment.
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I am submitting this change is because I have to write documentation about how to configure sandboxes and when one can avoid doing pre-sandbox initializations. In investigating this, I found that it is actually really difficult to document the seccomp policy for
poll
. The Chromium sandbox has conditional logic for __NR_POLL vs __NR_PPOLL for example. I added some more commentary about this in the comments of this PR.I am also trying to ensure that if somebody is already using OpenSSL (or a fork of it) then switching to a
getrandom
-based library will not affect their sandbox policies.So, in some sense it is hypothetical, but that's mostly because I write libraries for orgs who make frameworks for people who product applications.
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OpenSSL uses
select()
unless there are too many file descriptors open, in which case it will useread()
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Those additional comments look great! Thanks for the explanation, makes sense to me!