Bug#363516: [Pkg-openssl-devel] Bug#363516: valgrind-clean the RNG

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 04:01:22PM +0100, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> Package: openssl
> Version: 0.9.7e
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> Suppressions don't seem to be good enough to eliminate this
> unfortunately - the uninitializedness taints all the users of the
> openssl random number generator, producing valgrind hits throughout
> your program, making it unnecessarily difficult to see the wood for
> the trees.

This is not the proper way to fix it.  You can still find other
cases where you'll get the same results.

The problems are the following 2 pieces of code in
crypto/rand/md_rand.c:

247:
                MD_Update(&m,buf,j);

467:
#ifndef PURIFY
                MD_Update(&m,buf,j); /* purify complains */
#endif

What it's doing is adding uninitialised numbers to the pool to
create random numbers.

I've been thinking about commenting those out.

I've been told that using VALGRIND_MAKE_READABLE can be used to
suppress those errors.  So I've been pondering about building the
library with that.  I haven't tried that this works yet though.


Martin, what do you think about this?


Kurt