05cd988dce
There are many situations in which having access to a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG) is helpful. In the future, we'll encounter one of these when dealing with temporary files. To make this possible, let's add a function which reads from a system CSPRNG and returns some bytes. We know that all systems will have such an interface. A CSPRNG is required for a secure TLS or SSH implementation and a Git implementation which provided neither would be of little practical use. In addition, POSIX is set to standardize getentropy(2) in the next version, so in the (potentially distant) future we can rely on that. For systems which lack one of the other interfaces, we provide the ability to use OpenSSL's CSPRNG. OpenSSL is highly portable and functions on practically every known OS, and we know it will have access to some source of cryptographically secure randomness. We also provide support for the arc4random in libbsd for folks who would prefer to use that. Because this is a security sensitive interface, we take some precautions. We either succeed by filling the buffer completely as we requested, or we fail. We don't return partial data because the caller will almost never find that to be a useful behavior. Specify a makefile knob which users can use to specify one or more suitable CSPRNGs, and turn the multiple string options into a set of defines, since we cannot match on strings in the preprocessor. We allow multiple options to make the job of handling this in autoconf easier. The order of options is important here. On systems with arc4random, which is most of the BSDs, we use that, since, except on MirBSD and macOS, it uses ChaCha20, which is extremely fast, and sits entirely in userspace, avoiding a system call. We then prefer getrandom over getentropy, because the former has been available longer on Linux, and then OpenSSL. Finally, if none of those are available, we use /dev/urandom, because most Unix-like operating systems provide that API. We prefer options that don't involve device files when possible because those work in some restricted environments where device files may not be available. Set the configuration variables appropriately for Linux and the BSDs, including macOS, as well as Windows and NonStop. We specifically only consider versions which receive publicly available security support here. For the same reason, we don't specify getrandom(2) on Linux, because CentOS 7 doesn't support it in glibc (although its kernel does) and we don't want to resort to making syscalls. Finally, add a test helper to allow this to be tested by hand and in tests. We don't add any tests, since invoking the CSPRNG is not likely to produce interesting, reproducible results. Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Contributed Software Although these pieces are available as part of the official git source tree, they are in somewhat different status. The intention is to keep interesting tools around git here, maybe even experimental ones, to give users an easier access to them, and to give tools wider exposure, so that they can be improved faster. I am not expecting to touch these myself that much. As far as my day-to-day operation is concerned, these subdirectories are owned by their respective primary authors. I am willing to help if users of these components and the contrib/ subtree "owners" have technical/design issues to resolve, but the initiative to fix and/or enhance things _must_ be on the side of the subtree owners. IOW, I won't be actively looking for bugs and rooms for enhancements in them as the git maintainer -- I may only do so just as one of the users when I want to scratch my own itch. If you have patches to things in contrib/ area, the patch should be first sent to the primary author, and then the primary author should ack and forward it to me (git pull request is nicer). This is the same way as how I have been treating gitk, and to a lesser degree various foreign SCM interfaces, so you know the drill. I expect that things that start their life in the contrib/ area to graduate out of contrib/ once they mature, either by becoming projects on their own, or moving to the toplevel directory. On the other hand, I expect I'll be proposing removal of disused and inactive ones from time to time. If you have new things to add to this area, please first propose it on the git mailing list, and after a list discussion proves there are some general interests (it does not have to be a list-wide consensus for a tool targeted to a relatively narrow audience -- for example I do not work with projects whose upstream is svn, so I have no use for git-svn myself, but it is of general interest for people who need to interoperate with SVN repositories in a way git-svn works better than git-svnimport), submit a patch to create a subdirectory of contrib/ and put your stuff there. -jc