• Heikki Linnakangas's avatar
    Replace PostmasterRandom() with a stronger source, second attempt. · fe0a0b59
    Heikki Linnakangas authored
    This adds a new routine, pg_strong_random() for generating random bytes,
    for use in both frontend and backend. At the moment, it's only used in
    the backend, but the upcoming SCRAM authentication patches need strong
    random numbers in libpq as well.
    
    pg_strong_random() is based on, and replaces, the existing implementation
    in pgcrypto. It can acquire strong random numbers from a number of sources,
    depending on what's available:
    
    - OpenSSL RAND_bytes(), if built with OpenSSL
    - On Windows, the native cryptographic functions are used
    - /dev/urandom
    
    Unlike the current pgcrypto function, the source is chosen by configure.
    That makes it easier to test different implementations, and ensures that
    we don't accidentally fall back to a less secure implementation, if the
    primary source fails. All of those methods are quite reliable, it would be
    pretty surprising for them to fail, so we'd rather find out by failing
    hard.
    
    If no strong random source is available, we fall back to using erand48(),
    seeded from current timestamp, like PostmasterRandom() was. That isn't
    cryptographically secure, but allows us to still work on platforms that
    don't have any of the above stronger sources. Because it's not very secure,
    the built-in implementation is only used if explicitly requested with
    --disable-strong-random.
    
    This replaces the more complicated Fortuna algorithm we used to have in
    pgcrypto, which is unfortunate, but all modern platforms have /dev/urandom,
    so it doesn't seem worth the maintenance effort to keep that. pgcrypto
    functions that require strong random numbers will be disabled with
    --disable-strong-random.
    
    Original patch by Magnus Hagander, tons of further work by Michael Paquier
    and me.
    
    Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqRy3krN8quR9XujMVVHYtXJ0_60nqgVc6oUk8ygyVkZsA@mail.gmail.com
    Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqRWkNYRRPJA7-cF+LfroYV10pvjdz6GNvxk-Eee9FypKA@mail.gmail.com
    fe0a0b59
Makefile 996 Bytes