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crypto: qcom-rng - ensure buffer for generate is completely filled

Published Mar 5, 2024

Description

The generate function in struct rng_alg expects that the destination buffer is completely filled if the function returns 0. qcom_rng_read() can run into a situation where the buffer is partially filled with randomness and the remaining part of the buffer is zeroed since qcom_rng_generate() doesn't check the return value. This issue can be reproduced by running the following from libkcapi:

kcapi-rng -b 9000000 > OUTFILE

The generated OUTFILE will have three huge sections that contain all zeros, and this is caused by the code where the test 'val & PRNG_STATUS_DATA_AVAIL' fails.

Let's fix this issue by ensuring that qcom_rng_read() always returns with a full buffer if the function returns success. Let's also have qcom_rng_generate() return the correct value.

Here's some statistics from the ent project (https://www.fourmilab.ch/random/) that shows information about the quality of the generated numbers:

$ ent -c qcom-random-before Value Char Occurrences Fraction 0 606748 0.067416 1 33104 0.003678 2 33001 0.003667 ... 253 � 32883 0.003654 254 � 33035 0.003671 255 � 33239 0.003693

Total: 9000000 1.000000

Entropy = 7.811590 bits per byte.

Optimum compression would reduce the size of this 9000000 byte file by 2 percent.

Chi square distribution for 9000000 samples is 9329962.81, and randomly would exceed this value less than 0.01 percent of the times.

Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 119.3731 (127.5 = random). Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.197293333 (error 1.77 percent). Serial correlation coefficient is 0.159130 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).

Without this patch, the results of the chi-square test is 0.01%, and the numbers are certainly not random according to ent's project page. The results improve with this patch:

$ ent -c qcom-random-after Value Char Occurrences Fraction 0 35432 0.003937 1 35127 0.003903 2 35424 0.003936 ... 253 � 35201 0.003911 254 � 34835 0.003871 255 � 35368 0.003930

Total: 9000000 1.000000

Entropy = 7.999979 bits per byte.

Optimum compression would reduce the size of this 9000000 byte file by 0 percent.

Chi square distribution for 9000000 samples is 258.77, and randomly would exceed this value 42.24 percent of the times.

Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 127.5006 (127.5 = random). Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.141277333 (error 0.01 percent). Serial correlation coefficient is 0.000468 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).

This change was tested on a Nexus 5 phone (msm8974 SoC).

Affected products

Remediation

No remediation recorded yet.

Weaknesses (1)

References (11)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner Linux
Published Mar 5, 2024
Updated Aug 5, 2026
Reserved Feb 25, 2024
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated Mar 5, 2024
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Aug 4, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Low
Public date Mar 5, 2024