From 4397b56a3c31ce0a1b99f528f2422d406ddbc2c8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Simon McVittie Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2017 10:46:39 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] config-loader-expat: Tell Expat not to defend against hash collisions By default, Expat uses cryptographic-quality random numbers as a salt for its hash algorithm, and since 2.2.1 it gets them from the getrandom syscall on Linux. That syscall refuses to return any entropy until the kernel's CSPRNG (random pool) has been initialized. Unfortunately, this can take as long as 40 seconds on embedded devices with few entropy sources, which is too long: if the system dbus-daemon blocks for that length of time, important D-Bus clients like systemd and systemd-logind time out and fail to connect to it. We're parsing small configuration files here, and we trust them completely, so we don't need to defend against hash collisions: nobody is going to be crafting them to cause pathological performance. Bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101858 Signed-off-by: Simon McVittie --- bus/config-loader-expat.c | 14 ++++++++++++++ configure.ac | 8 ++++++++ 2 files changed, 22 insertions(+) diff --git a/bus/config-loader-expat.c b/bus/config-loader-expat.c index b571fda3..27cbe2d0 100644 --- a/bus/config-loader-expat.c +++ b/bus/config-loader-expat.c @@ -203,6 +203,20 @@ bus_config_load (const DBusString *file, goto failed; } + /* We do not need protection against hash collisions (CVE-2012-0876) + * because we are only parsing trusted XML; and if we let Expat block + * waiting for the CSPRNG to be initialized, as it does by default to + * defeat CVE-2012-0876, it can cause timeouts during early boot on + * entropy-starved embedded devices. + * + * TODO: When Expat gets a more explicit API for this than + * XML_SetHashSalt, check for that too, and use it preferentially. + * https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/issues/91 */ +#if defined(HAVE_XML_SETHASHSALT) + /* Any nonzero number will do. https://xkcd.com/221/ */ + XML_SetHashSalt (expat, 4); +#endif + if (!_dbus_string_get_dirname (file, &dirname)) { dbus_set_error (error, DBUS_ERROR_NO_MEMORY, NULL); diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac index e819611a..77548169 100644 --- a/configure.ac +++ b/configure.ac @@ -938,6 +938,14 @@ XML_CFLAGS= AC_SUBST([XML_CFLAGS]) AC_SUBST([XML_LIBS]) +save_cflags="$CFLAGS" +save_libs="$LIBS" +CFLAGS="$CFLAGS $XML_CFLAGS" +LIBS="$LIBS $XML_LIBS" +AC_CHECK_FUNCS([XML_SetHashSalt]) +CFLAGS="$save_cflags" +LIBS="$save_libs" + # Thread lib detection AC_ARG_VAR([THREAD_LIBS]) save_libs="$LIBS" -- 2.13.3