Amusingly, after months of pointless bikeshedding, we managed to convince the internals team to throw an exception during the extreme case of a CSPRNG failure.

Amusingly, after months of pointless bikeshedding, we managed to convince the internals team to throw an exception during the extreme case of a CSPRNG failure. https://www.sammyk.me/security-changes-to-the-php-7-csprng-in-rc3 https://www.sammyk.me/security-changes-to-the-php-7-csprng-i... You can read my arguments on the mailing list, but basically it amounted to: $chars = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz234567'; for ($i = 0; $i < 12; ++$i) { $password .= $chars[random_int(0, 31)]; } If random_int() returned FALSE, $password would be the string 'aaaaaaaaaaaa' (and you'd have 12 E_WARNING errors in your log). By making it an exception, random_int() will now fail closed (kill the script by default), but the developer can still handle it gracefully. $chars = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz234567'; try { for ($i = 0; $i < 12; ++$i) { $password .= $chars[random_int(0, 31)]; } } catch (Throwable $e) { $framework->template->kill('An unrecoverable fatal error occurred.'); } Or something similar. Is it a BC break? Sure. Is it worth it? Oh yeah.