The implementation is based on scalar Chacha20 with per-thread cache.
It uses getrandom or /dev/urandom as fallback to get the initial entropy,
and reseeds the internal state on every 16MB of consumed buffer.
To improve performance and lower memory consumption the per-thread cache
is allocated lazily on first arc4random functions call, and if the
memory allocation fails getentropy or /dev/urandom is used as fallback.
The cache is also cleared on thread exit iff it was initialized (so if
arc4random is not called it is not touched).
Although it is lock-free, arc4random is still not async-signal-safe
(the per thread state is not updated atomically).
The ChaCha20 implementation is based on RFC8439 [1], omitting the final
XOR of the keystream with the plaintext because the plaintext is a
stream of zeros. This strategy is similar to what OpenBSD arc4random
does.
The arc4random_uniform is based on previous work by Florian Weimer,
where the algorithm is based on Jérémie Lumbroso paper Optimal Discrete
Uniform Generation from Coin Flips, and Applications (2013) [2], who
credits Donald E. Knuth and Andrew C. Yao, The complexity of nonuniform
random number generation (1976), for solving the general case.
The main advantage of this method is the that the unit of randomness is not
the uniform random variable (uint32_t), but a random bit. It optimizes the
internal buffer sampling by initially consuming a 32-bit random variable
and then sampling byte per byte. Depending of the upper bound requested,
it might lead to better CPU utilization.
Checked on x86_64-linux-gnu, aarch64-linux, and powerpc64le-linux-gnu.
Co-authored-by: Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Yann Droneaud <ydroneaud@opteya.com>
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8439
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.1916.pdf
I used these shell commands:
../glibc/scripts/update-copyrights $PWD/../gnulib/build-aux/update-copyright
(cd ../glibc && git commit -am"[this commit message]")
and then ignored the output, which consisted lines saying "FOO: warning:
copyright statement not found" for each of 7061 files FOO.
I then removed trailing white space from math/tgmath.h,
support/tst-support-open-dev-null-range.c, and
sysdeps/x86_64/multiarch/strlen-vec.S, to work around the following
obscure pre-commit check failure diagnostics from Savannah. I don't
know why I run into these diagnostics whereas others evidently do not.
remote: *** 912-#endif
remote: *** 913:
remote: *** 914-
remote: *** error: lines with trailing whitespace found
...
remote: *** error: sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/statx_cp.c: trailing lines
This was put in __libc_fork by c32c868ab8 ("posix: Add _Fork [BZ #4737]")
so we need to avoid locking them again in _Fork called by __libc_lock, otherwise
we deadlock.
The Linux nptl implementation is used as base for generic fork
implementation to handle the internal locks and mutexes. The
system specific bits are moved a new internal _Fork symbol.
(This new implementation will be used to provide a async-signal-safe
_Fork now that POSIX has clarified that fork might not be
async-signal-safe [1]).
For Hurd it means that the __nss_database_fork_prepare_parent and
__nss_database_fork_subprocess will be run in a slight different
order.
[1] https://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=62
