From: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
To: Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com>
Cc: "David S . Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>,
linux-crypto@vger.kernel.org,
Nathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org>,
Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>,
clang-built-linux@googlegroups.com,
kernel-janitors@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] crypto: sha512: remove imaginary and mystifying clearing of variables
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2021 16:38:42 +0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20210827083842.GF21571@gondor.apana.org.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210822103107.28974-1-lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com>
On Sun, Aug 22, 2021 at 12:31:07PM +0200, Lukas Bulwahn wrote:
> The function sha512_transform() assigns all local variables to 0 before
> returning to its caller with the intent to erase sensitive data.
>
> However, make clang-analyzer warns that all these assignments are dead
> stores, and as commit 7a4295f6c9d5 ("crypto: lib/sha256 - Don't clear
> temporary variables") already points out for sha256_transform():
>
> The assignments to clear a through h and t1/t2 are optimized out by the
> compiler because they are unused after the assignments.
>
> Clearing individual scalar variables is unlikely to be useful, as they
> may have been assigned to registers, and even if stack spilling was
> required, there may be compiler-generated temporaries that are
> impossible to clear in any case.
>
> This applies here again as well. Drop meaningless clearing of local
> variables and avoid this way that the code suggests that data is erased,
> which simply does not happen.
>
> Signed-off-by: Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com>
> ---
> crypto/sha512_generic.c | 3 ---
> 1 file changed, 3 deletions(-)
Patch applied. Thanks.
--
Email: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-08-27 8:38 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-08-22 10:31 [PATCH] crypto: sha512: remove imaginary and mystifying clearing of variables Lukas Bulwahn
2021-08-25 22:24 ` Nick Desaulniers
2021-08-27 8:38 ` Herbert Xu [this message]
2021-08-28 7:46 ` Sandy Harris
2021-08-31 18:49 ` Eric Biggers
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