CVE-2024-35875

medium

Published 2024-09-11 · Modified 2024-11-03

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CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

5.5

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: x86/coco: Require seeding RNG with RDRAND on CoCo systems There are few uses of CoCo that don't rely on working cryptography and hence a working RNG. Unfortunately, the CoCo threat model means that the VM host cannot be trusted and may actively work against guests to extract secrets or manipulate computation. Since a malicious host can modify or observe nearly all inputs to guests, the only remaining source of entropy for CoCo guests is RDRAND. If RDRAND is broken -- due to CPU hardware fault -- the RNG as a whole is meant to gracefully continue on gathering entropy from other sources, but since there aren't other sources on CoCo, this is catastrophic. This is mostly a concern at boot time when initially seeding the RNG, as after that the consequences of a broken RDRAND are much more theoretical. So, try at boot to seed the RNG using 256 bits of RDRAND output. If this fails, panic(). This will also trigger if the system is booted without RDRAND, as RDRAND is essential for a safe CoCo boot. Add this deliberately to be "just a CoCo x86 driver feature" and not part of the RNG itself. Many device drivers and platforms have some desire to contribute something to the RNG, and add_device_randomness() is specifically meant for this purpose. Any driver can call it with seed data of any quality, or even garbage quality, and it can only possibly make the quality of the RNG better or have no effect, but can never make it worse. Rather than trying to build something into the core of the RNG, consider the particular CoCo issue just a CoCo issue, and therefore separate it all out into driver (well, arch/platform) code. [ bp: Massage commit message. ]

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

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Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

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OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
rhel	9	fixed
sles		affected
rocky	9	fixed
debian	bookworm	fixed	`6.1.85-1`
debian	bullseye	affected
debian	forky	fixed	`6.8.9-1`
debian	sid	fixed	`6.8.9-1`
debian	trixie	fixed	`6.8.9-1`
almalinux	9	fixed	`kernel-headers-5.14.0-427.35.1.el9_4.aarch64.rpm`

References

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.