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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published Mar 5, 2024· Updated May 4, 2025

crypto: qcom-rng - ensure buffer for generate is completely filled

CVE-2022-48629

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

crypto: qcom-rng - ensure buffer for generate is completely filled

The generate function in struct rng_alg expects that the destination buffer is completely filled if the function returns 0. qcom_rng_read() can run into a situation where the buffer is partially filled with randomness and the remaining part of the buffer is zeroed since qcom_rng_generate() doesn't check the return value. This issue can be reproduced by running the following from libkcapi:

kcapi-rng -b 9000000 > OUTFILE

The generated OUTFILE will have three huge sections that contain all zeros, and this is caused by the code where the test 'val & PRNG_STATUS_DATA_AVAIL' fails.

Let's fix this issue by ensuring that qcom_rng_read() always returns with a full buffer if the function returns success. Let's also have qcom_rng_generate() return the correct value.

Here's some statistics from the ent project (https://www.fourmilab.ch/random/) that shows information about the quality of the generated numbers:

$ ent -c qcom-random-before Value Char Occurrences Fraction 0 606748 0.067416 1 33104 0.003678 2 33001 0.003667 ... 253 � 32883 0.003654 254 � 33035 0.003671 255 � 33239 0.003693

Total: 9000000 1.000000

Entropy = 7.811590 bits per byte.

Optimum compression would reduce the size of this 9000000 byte file by 2 percent.

Chi square distribution for 9000000 samples is 9329962.81, and randomly would exceed this value less than 0.01 percent of the times.

Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 119.3731 (127.5 = random). Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.197293333 (error 1.77 percent). Serial correlation coefficient is 0.159130 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).

Without this patch, the results of the chi-square test is 0.01%, and the numbers are certainly not random according to ent's project page. The results improve with this patch:

$ ent -c qcom-random-after Value Char Occurrences Fraction 0 35432 0.003937 1 35127 0.003903 2 35424 0.003936 ... 253 � 35201 0.003911 254 � 34835 0.003871 255 � 35368 0.003930

Total: 9000000 1.000000

Entropy = 7.999979 bits per byte.

Optimum compression would reduce the size of this 9000000 byte file by 0 percent.

Chi square distribution for 9000000 samples is 258.77, and randomly would exceed this value 42.24 percent of the times.

Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 127.5006 (127.5 = random). Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.141277333 (error 0.01 percent). Serial correlation coefficient is 0.000468 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).

This change was tested on a Nexus 5 phone (msm8974 SoC).

Affected products

100

Patches

0

No patches discovered yet.

Vulnerability mechanics

AI mechanics synthesis has not run for this CVE yet.

References

6

News mentions

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