FreeBSD random number generator broken for last 4 months

[Security] Posted Feb 18, 2015 14:28 UTC (Wed) by jake

As several LWN readers have pointed out, John-Mark Gurney posted a message to the freebsd-current mailing list on February 17 noting that the random number generator (RNG) in the FreeBSD "current" kernel has been broken for the last four months. "If you are running a current kernel r273872 or later, please upgrade your kernel to r278907 or later immediately and regenerate keys. I discovered an issue where the new framework code was not calling randomdev_init_reader, which means that read_random(9) was not returning good random data. read_random(9) is used by arc4random(9) which is the primary method that arc4random(3) is seeded from. This means most/all keys generated may be predictable and must be regenerated. This includes, but not limited to, ssh keys and keys generated by openssl. This is purely a kernel issue, and a simple kernel upgrade w/ the patch is sufficient to fix the issue."

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