[New-bugs-announce] [issue9123] insecure os.urandom on VMS

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

New submission from Zooko O'Whielacronx <zooko at zooko.com>:

os.urandom() on VMS invokes OpenSSL's RAND_pseudo_bytes(). That is documented on:

http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/RAND_bytes.html

as being predictable and therefore unsuitable for many cryptographic purposes. This is inconsistent with the documentation of os.urandom():

"""
urandom(n) -> str\n\n\
Return a string of n random bytes suitable for cryptographic use.
"""

This probably means that users of Python on VMS are vulnerable to attack based on the predictability of the results they get from os.urandom().

Honestly, I would have guessed that there *were* no users of Python on VMS when I started this bug report, but look--apparently there are:

http://www.vmspython.org

To fix this, change the call from RAND_pseudo_bytes() to RAND_bytes(). It has the same type signature and actually does what os.urandom() needs.

----------
messages: 108963
nosy: zooko
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: insecure os.urandom on VMS

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue9123>
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