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arc4random initialises itself with some random bytes from the kernel, but rather than using those bytes directly, a stream cipher is used to produce longer streams of output. Re-seeding happens occasionally thereafter. The intention was to avoid the overhead of a system call, for each call to arc4random(3) | arc4random(3) initialises itself with some random bytes from the kernel, but rather than returning those bytes directly, a stream cipher is used to produce longer streams of output. Re-seeding happens occasionally thereafter. The intention was to avoid the overhead of making a system call, on each call to arc4random(3) |
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FreeBSD makes a system call to getpid(2) to check whether it should do this, but that means the overhead of arc4random(3) could be worse than if the RC4 cipher wasn't used at all... | FreeBSD makes a system call to getpid(2) to detect forking, but that means the overhead of its arc4random(3) may be worse than if the RC4 cipher wasn't being used there at all... |
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libbsd changed from using RC4 to ChaCha20 in version 0.8.0 (Debian package version 0.8.0-1). | https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2014-July/007849.html |
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libbsd provides an arc4random(3), previous using RC4 but this was changed to ChaCha20 in version 0.8.0 (Debian package version 0.8.0-1). GNU libc's atfork can be used to reliably detect forking. |
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Similar code to arc4random can be found in libevent, and dozens of other free software programs. | Similar code to arc4random(3) can be found in libevent, and dozens of other free software programs. |
arc4random(3) is random-number-generating library function, first available on BSD platforms, and also on GNU/Linux with libbsd.
Manual pages
http://man.openbsd.org/?query=arc4random
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=arc4random
https://manpages.debian.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=arc4random
Implementation
arc4random(3) initialises itself with some random bytes from the kernel, but rather than returning those bytes directly, a stream cipher is used to produce longer streams of output. Re-seeding happens occasionally thereafter. The intention was to avoid the overhead of making a system call, on each call to arc4random(3)
The function when originally implemented in OpenBSD, used the RC4 cipher to produce the output stream. OpenBSD now uses a ?ChaCha20 stream cipher.
If a process forks, it should re-seed itself to avoid each process sharing the same RNG state. OpenBSD uses the mmap(2) INHERIT_ZERO flag to reliably detect forks, and then re-seed.
FreeBSD makes a system call to getpid(2) to detect forking, but that means the overhead of its arc4random(3) may be worse than if the RC4 cipher wasn't being used there at all...
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2014-July/007849.html
FreeBSD's libc still uses RC4 libkern/arc4random.c, but discards the first 1024 bytes of the stream cipher's output, to try to mitigate known weaknesses in the cipher.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/lib/libc/gen/arc4random.c?view=markup
and is also used within the kernel:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/libkern/arc4random.c?view=markup
libbsd provides an arc4random(3), previous using RC4 but this was changed to ?ChaCha20 in version 0.8.0 (Debian package version 0.8.0-1). GNU libc's atfork can be used to reliably detect forking.
GNU/kFreeBSD provides only the libbsd implementation.
Similar code to arc4random(3) can be found in libevent, and dozens of other free software programs.
Concerns
RC4 is not considered to be a cryptographically strong cipher any more.
Some implementations discard the first 1KByte of more of the keystream as a possible countermeasure, but some do not.
Some implementations don't re-seed reliably (or perhaps at all) when a process forks.
https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/libressls_prng_is_unsafe_on_linux
Some methods of seeding are unsafe, and failures cannot be indicated to the caller. In a chroot/jail environment, perhaps /dev/urandom is missing. Or if all file descriptors are exhausted, nothing can be read from there. OpenBSD and FreeBSD provide system calls that are guaranteed to not fail.