CVE-2024-35875

x86/coco: Require seeding RNG with RDRAND on CoCo systems

State
Published
Severity
8.4 High
Published
May 19, 2024
Updated
Aug 5, 2026
Reserved
May 17, 2024

Read the record on cve.org

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86/coco: Require seeding RNG with RDRAND on CoCo systems

There are few uses of CoCo that don't rely on working cryptography and hence a working RNG. Unfortunately, the CoCo threat model means that the VM host cannot be trusted and may actively work against guests to extract secrets or manipulate computation. Since a malicious host can modify or observe nearly all inputs to guests, the only remaining source of entropy for CoCo guests is RDRAND.

If RDRAND is broken -- due to CPU hardware fault -- the RNG as a whole is meant to gracefully continue on gathering entropy from other sources, but since there aren't other sources on CoCo, this is catastrophic. This is mostly a concern at boot time when initially seeding the RNG, as after that the consequences of a broken RDRAND are much more theoretical.

So, try at boot to seed the RNG using 256 bits of RDRAND output. If this fails, panic(). This will also trigger if the system is booted without RDRAND, as RDRAND is essential for a safe CoCo boot.

Add this deliberately to be "just a CoCo x86 driver feature" and not part of the RNG itself. Many device drivers and platforms have some desire to contribute something to the RNG, and add_device_randomness() is specifically meant for this purpose.

Any driver can call it with seed data of any quality, or even garbage quality, and it can only possibly make the quality of the RNG better or have no effect, but can never make it worse.

Rather than trying to build something into the core of the RNG, consider the particular CoCo issue just a CoCo issue, and therefore separate it all out into driver (well, arch/platform) code.

[ bp: Massage commit message. ]

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.18.4 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HLinux

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • d8aa7eea78a1401cce39b3bb61ead0150044a3df to before 22943e4fe4b3a2dcbadc3d38d5bf840bbdbfe374Affected
  • d8aa7eea78a1401cce39b3bb61ead0150044a3df to before 453b5f2dec276c1bb4ea078bf8c0da57ee4627e5Affected
  • d8aa7eea78a1401cce39b3bb61ead0150044a3df to before 08044b08b37528b82f70a87576c692b4e4b7716eAffected
  • d8aa7eea78a1401cce39b3bb61ead0150044a3df to before 99485c4c026f024e7cb82da84c7951dbe3deb584Affected
LinuxLinux
  • 4.15Affected
  • before 4.15Not affected
  • 6.1.85 through 6.1.*Not affected
  • 6.6.26 through 6.6.*Not affected
  • 6.8.5 through 6.8.*Not affected
  • 6.9 and laterNot affected

References

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