Now that the random seed is used on virtualized systems, there's no
point in having a random-seed-mode toggle switch. Let's just always
require it now, with the existing logic already being there to allow not
having it if EFI itself has an RNG. In other words, the logic for this
can now be automatic.
Removing the virtualization check might not be the worst thing in the
world, and would potentially get many, many more systems properly seeded
rather than not seeded. There are a few reasons to consider this:
- In most QEMU setups and most guides on how to setup QEMU, a separate
pflash file is used for nvram variables, and this generally isn't
copied around.
- We're now hashing in a timestamp, which should provide some level of
differentiation, given that EFI_TIME has a nanoseconds field.
- The kernel itself will additionally hash in: a high resolution time
stamp, a cycle counter, RDRAND output, the VMGENID uniquely
identifying the virtual machine, any other seeds from the hypervisor
(like from FDT or setup_data).
- During early boot, the RNG is reseeded quite frequently to account for
the importance of early differentiation.
So maybe the mitigating factors make the actual feared problem
significantly less likely and therefore the pros of having file-based
seeding might outweigh the cons of weird misconfigured setups having a
hypothetical problem on first boot.
Rather than passing seeds up to userspace via EFI variables, pass seeds
directly to the kernel's EFI stub loader, via LINUX_EFI_RANDOM_SEED_TABLE_GUID.
EFI variables can potentially leak and suffer from forward secrecy
issues, and processing these with userspace means that they are
initialized much too late in boot to be useful. In contrast,
LINUX_EFI_RANDOM_SEED_TABLE_GUID uses EFI configuration tables, and so
is hidden from userspace entirely, and is parsed extremely early on by
the kernel, so that every single call to get_random_bytes() by the
kernel is seeded.
In order to do this properly, we use a bit more robust hashing scheme,
and make sure that each input is properly memzeroed out after use. The
scheme is:
key = HASH(LABEL || sizeof(input1) || input1 || ... || sizeof(inputN) || inputN)
new_disk_seed = HASH(key || 0)
seed_for_linux = HASH(key || 1)
The various inputs are:
- LINUX_EFI_RANDOM_SEED_TABLE_GUID from prior bootloaders
- 256 bits of seed from EFI's RNG
- The (immutable) system token, from its EFI variable
- The prior on-disk seed
- The UEFI monotonic counter
- A timestamp
This also adjusts the secure boot semantics, so that the operation is
only aborted if it's not possible to get random bytes from EFI's RNG or
a prior boot stage. With the proper hashing scheme, this should make
boot seeds safe even on secure boot.
There is currently a bug in Linux's EFI stub in which if the EFI stub
manages to generate random bytes on its own using EFI's RNG, it will
ignore what the bootloader passes. That's annoying, but it means that
either way, via systemd-boot or via EFI stub's mechanism, the RNG *does*
get initialized in a good safe way. And this bug is now fixed in the
efi.git tree, and will hopefully be backported to older kernels.
As the kernel recommends, the resultant seeds are 256 bits and are
allocated using pool memory of type EfiACPIReclaimMemory, so that it
gets freed at the right moment in boot.
This is useful to force off fancy unicode glyph use (i.e. use "->"
instead of "→"), which is useful in tests where locales might be
missing, and thus control via $LC_CTYPE is not reliable.
Use this in TEST-58, to ensure the output checks we do aren't confused
by missing these glyphs being unicode or not.
This reverts commit 1f22621ba3.
As described in the reverted commit, we don't want to get rid of the check
completely. But the check requires opting-in by setting SYSTEMD_IN_INITRD=lenient,
which is cumbersome and doesn't seem to actually happen.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2137631 is caused by systemd refusing
to treat the system as an initrd because overlayfs is used. Let's revert this
approach and do something that doesn't require opt-in instead.
I don't think it makes sense to keep support for "SYSTEMD_IN_INITRD=lenient" or
"SYSTEMD_IN_INITRD=auto". To get "auto" behaviour, just unset the option. And
"lenient" will be reimplemented as a better check. Thus the changes to the
option interface are completely reverted.
(s) is just ugly with a vibe of DOS. In most cases just using the normal plural
form is more natural and gramatically correct.
There are some log_debug() statements left, and texts in foreign licenses or
headers. Those are not touched on purpose.
Previously, we'd iterate an entry array from start to end every time
we added an entry offset to it. To speed up this operation, we cache
the last entry array in the chain and how many items it contains.
This allows the addition of an entry to the chain to be done in
constant time instead of linear time as we don't have to iterate
the entire chain anymore every time we add an entry.
To do this, we move EntryItem out of journal-def.h and turn it into
a host only struct in native endian mode so we can still use it to
ship the necessary info around.
Aside from that, the changes are pretty simple, we introduce some
extra functions to access the right field depending on the mode and
convert all the other code to use those functions instead of
accessing the raw fields.
We also drop the unused entry item hash field in compact mode. We
already stopped doing anything with this field a while ago, now we
actually drop it from the format in compact mode.
