Re: Move OpenSSL random under USE_OPENSSL_RANDOM

Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>

From: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
To: Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
Cc: Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>, Postgres hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2020-11-03T10:35:18Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Tue, Nov 03, 2020 at 10:15:48AM +0100, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 2:19 PM Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se> wrote:
>> That's certainly true.  The intention though is to make the code easier to
>> follow (more explicit/discoverable) for anyone trying to implement support for
> 
> Is it really a reasonable usecase to use RAND_bytes() outside of both
> pg_stroing_random() *and' outside of the openssl-specific files (like
> be-secure-openssl.c)? Because it would only be those cases that would
> have this case, right?

It does not sound that strange to me to assume if some out-of-core
code makes use of that to fetch a random set of bytes.  Now I don't
know of any code doing that.  Who knows.

> If anything, perhaps the call to RAND_poll() in fork_process.c should
> actually be a call to a strong_random_initialize() or something which
> would have an implementation in pg_strong_random.c, thereby isolating
> the openssl specific code in there? (And with a void implementation
> without openssl)

I don't think that we have any need to go to such extent just for this
case, as RAND_poll() after forking a process is irrelevant in 1.1.1.
We are still many years away from removing its support though.

No idea if other SSL implementations would require such a thing.
Daniel, what about NSS?
--
Michael

Commits

  1. Remove ability to independently select random number generator

  2. Add pg_strong_random_init function to initialize random number generator