wrapper: use a CSPRNG to generate random file names

The current way we generate random file names is by taking the seconds and microseconds, plus the PID, and mixing them together, then encoding them. If this fails, we increment the value by 7777, and try again up to TMP_MAX times. Unfortunately, this is not the best idea from a security perspective. If we're writing into TMPDIR, an attacker can guess these values easily and prevent us from creating any temporary files at all by creating them all first. Even though we set TMP_MAX to 16384, this may be achievable in some contexts, even if unlikely to occur in practice. Fortunately, we can simply solve this by using the system cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG) to generate a random 64-bit value, and use that as before. Note that there is still a small bias here, but because a six-character sequence chosen out of 62 characters provides about 36 bits of entropy, the bias here is less than 2^-28, which is acceptable, especially considering we'll retry several times. Note that the use of a CSPRNG in generating temporary file names is also used in many libcs. glibc recently changed from an approach similar to ours to using a CSPRNG, and FreeBSD and OpenBSD also use a CSPRNG in this case. Even if the likelihood of an attack is low, we should still be at least as responsible in creating temporary files as libc is. Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

brian m. carlson committed Jan 17, 2022 at 21:56 UTC 47efda967cfd4ef9d39de149e1e3654b051e5d19
1 file changed +4 -11
wrapper.c
+4 -11
@@ -463,8 +463,6 @@ int git_mkstemps_mode(char *pattern, int suffix_len, int mode)
463 static const int num_letters = ARRAY_SIZE(letters) - 1;
464 static const char x_pattern[] = "XXXXXX";
465 static const int num_x = ARRAY_SIZE(x_pattern) - 1;
466 - uint64_t value;
467 - struct timeval tv;
466 char *filename_template;
467 size_t len;
468 int fd, count;
@@ -485,12 +483,13 @@ int git_mkstemps_mode(char *pattern, int suffix_len, int mode)
483 * Replace pattern's XXXXXX characters with randomness.
484 * Try TMP_MAX different filenames.
485 */
488 - gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
489 - value = ((uint64_t)tv.tv_usec << 16) ^ tv.tv_sec ^ getpid();
486 filename_template = &pattern[len - num_x - suffix_len];
487 for (count = 0; count < TMP_MAX; ++count) {
492 - uint64_t v = value;
488 int i;
489 + uint64_t v;
490 + if (csprng_bytes(&v, sizeof(v)) < 0)
491 + return error_errno("unable to get random bytes for temporary file");
492 +
493 /* Fill in the random bits. */
494 for (i = 0; i < num_x; i++) {
495 filename_template[i] = letters[v % num_letters];
@@ -506,12 +505,6 @@ int git_mkstemps_mode(char *pattern, int suffix_len, int mode)
505 */
506 if (errno != EEXIST)
507 break;
509 - /*
510 - * This is a random value. It is only necessary that
511 - * the next TMP_MAX values generated by adding 7777 to
512 - * VALUE are different with (module 2^32).
513 - */
514 - value += 7777;
508 }
509 /* We return the null string if we can't find a unique file name. */
510 pattern[0] = '\0';