tree a03acbf2b6426dc27d642bacedd567611896d709
parent 5d0e5ea343a0f70351428476bcf8715e0731f26a
author Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com> 1483727521 +0100
committer Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> 1485545106 -0500

random: use chacha20 for get_random_int/long

Now that our crng uses chacha20, we can rely on its speedy
characteristics for replacing MD5, while simultaneously achieving a
higher security guarantee. Before the idea was to use these functions if
you wanted random integers that aren't stupidly insecure but aren't
necessarily secure either, a vague gray zone, that hopefully was "good
enough" for its users. With chacha20, we can strengthen this claim,
since either we're using an rdrand-like instruction, or we're using the
same crng as /dev/urandom. And it's faster than what was before.

We could have chosen to replace this with a SipHash-derived function,
which might be slightly faster, but at the cost of having yet another
RNG construction in the kernel. By moving to chacha20, we have a single
RNG to analyze and verify, and we also already get good performance
improvements on all platforms.

Implementation-wise, rather than use a generic buffer for both
get_random_int/long and memcpy based on the size needs, we use a
specific buffer for 32-bit reads and for 64-bit reads. This way, we're
guaranteed to always have aligned accesses on all platforms. While
slightly more verbose in C, the assembly this generates is a lot
simpler than otherwise.

Finally, on 32-bit platforms where longs and ints are the same size,
we simply alias get_random_int to get_random_long.

Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
Suggested-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@stressinduktion.org>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>