Re: CVE Request: pwgen

[Michael Samuel <mik () miknet net>]

Hi,

I was the person who reported this via launchpad.

The fallback could possibly be triggered accidentally by MAC schemes, such 
as selinux and apparmor.

There's 8 packages in Ubuntu that depend on this, so I guess it would be 
worth checking them to see if they execute pwgen in an apparmor context that 
doesn't allow /dev/urandom access.  I had a quick look at maas-region-
controller, and it seems to just be calling it from a postinst script.

I have a patch attached to the LP bug that removes the fallback (in favour 
of bailing out with an message to stderr and exit code 1), and removes the 
modulo bias.

The default mode of this program generates extremely low entropy passwords - 
It is probably worth changing the default to "secure" mode and removing 
phonemes mode, to avoid putting users at risk.

Regards,
  Michael