random: use BLAKE2s instead of SHA1 in extraction

This commit addresses one of the lower hanging fruits of the RNG: its
usage of SHA1.

BLAKE2s is generally faster, and certainly more secure, than SHA1, which
has [1] been [2] really [3] very [4] broken [5]. Additionally, the
current construction in the RNG doesn't use the full SHA1 function, as
specified, and allows overwriting the IV with RDRAND output in an
undocumented way, even in the case when RDRAND isn't set to "trusted",
which means potential malicious IV choices. And its short length means
that keeping only half of it secret when feeding back into the mixer
gives us only 2^80 bits of forward secrecy. In other words, not only is
the choice of hash function dated, but the use of it isn't really great
either.

This commit aims to fix both of these issues while also keeping the
general structure and semantics as close to the original as possible.
Specifically:

   a) Rather than overwriting the hash IV with RDRAND, we put it into
      BLAKE2's documented "salt" and "personal" fields, which were
      specifically created for this type of usage.
   b) Since this function feeds the full hash result back into the
      entropy collector, we only return from it half the length of the
      hash, just as it was done before. This increases the
      construction's forward secrecy from 2^80 to a much more
      comfortable 2^128.
   c) Rather than using the raw "sha1_transform" function alone, we
      instead use the full proper BLAKE2s function, with finalization.

This also has the advantage of supplying 16 bytes at a time rather than
SHA1's 10 bytes, which, in addition to having a faster compression
function to begin with, means faster extraction in general. On an Intel
i7-11850H, this commit makes initial seeding around 131% faster.

BLAKE2s itself has the nice property of internally being based on the
ChaCha permutation, which the RNG is already using for expansion, so
there shouldn't be any issue with newness, funkiness, or surprising CPU
behavior, since it's based on something already in use.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2005/010.pdf
[2] https://www.iacr.org/archive/crypto2005/36210017/36210017.pdf
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/967.pdf
[4] https://shattered.io/static/shattered.pdf
[5] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec20-leurent.pdf

Reviewed-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Reviewed-by: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Jean-Philippe Aumasson <jeanphilippe.aumasson@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions