This topic has come up countless times, and usually doesn't go anywhere.
This time I thought I'd bring it up with a slightly narrower focus,
updated for some developments over the last three years: we finally can
make /dev/urandom always secure, in light of the fact that our RNG is
now always seeded.

Ever since Linus' 50ee7529 ("random: try to actively add entropy
rather than passively wait for it"), the RNG does a haveged-style jitter
dance around the scheduler, in order to produce entropy (and credit it)
for the case when we're stuck in wait_for_random_bytes(). How ever you
feel about the Linus Jitter Dance is beside the point: it's been there
for three years and usually gets the RNG initialized in a second or so.

As a matter of fact, this is what happens currently when people use
getrandom(). It's already there and working, and most people have been
using it for years without realizing.

So, given that the kernel has grown this mechanism for seeding itself
from nothing, and that this procedure happens pretty fast, maybe there's
no point any longer in having /dev/urandom give insecure bytes. In the
past we didn't want the boot process to deadlock, which was
understandable. But now, in the worst case, a second goes by, and the
problem is resolved. It seems like maybe we're finally at a point when
we can get rid of the infamous "urandom read hole".

The one slight drawback is that the Linus Jitter Dance relies on random_
get_entropy() being implemented. The first lines of try_to_generate_
entropy() are:

	stack.now = random_get_entropy();
	if (stack.now == random_get_entropy())
		return;

On most platforms, random_get_entropy() is simply aliased to get_cycles().
The number of machines without a cycle counter or some other
implementation of random_get_entropy() in 2022, which can also run a
mainline kernel, and at the same time have a both broken and out of date
userspace that relies on /dev/urandom never blocking at boot is thought
to be exceedingly low. And to be clear: those museum pieces without
cycle counters will continue to run Linux just fine, and even
/dev/urandom will be operable just like before; the RNG just needs to be
seeded first through the usual means, which should already be the case
now.

On systems that really do want unseeded randomness, we already offer
getrandom(GRND_INSECURE), which is in use by, e.g., systemd for seeding
their hash tables at boot. Nothing in this commit would affect
GRND_INSECURE, and it remains the means of getting those types of random
numbers.

This patch goes a long way toward eliminating a long overdue userspace
crypto footgun. After several decades of endless user confusion, we will
finally be able to say, "use any single one of our random interfaces and
you'll be fine. They're all the same. It doesn't matter." And that, I
think, is really something. Finally all of those blog posts and
disagreeing forums and contradictory articles will all become correct
about whatever they happened to recommend, and along with it, a whole
class of vulnerabilities eliminated.

With very minimal downside, we're finally in a position where we can
make this change.

Cc: Dinh Nguyen <dinguyen@kernel.org>
Cc: Nick Hu <nickhu@andestech.com>
Cc: Max Filippov <jcmvbkbc@gmail.com>
Cc: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@dabbelt.com>
Cc: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Yoshinori Sato <ysato@users.sourceforge.jp>
Cc: Michal Simek <monstr@monstr.eu>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Guo Ren <guoren@kernel.org>
Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
Cc: Joshua Kinard <kumba@gentoo.org>
Cc: David Laight <David.Laight@aculab.com>
Cc: Dominik Brodowski <linux@dominikbrodowski.net>
Cc: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
Cc: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Lennart Poettering <mzxreary@0pointer.de>
Cc: Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>