3 ms·

"/dev/urandom and CryptGenRandom which are known to be good" Check out "A good idea with bad usage: /dev/urandom": http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-

• geofft 11y ago
  ... I'm not sure I can take an article seriously that suggests "but what if the attacker can modify files in /dev?". In any case, the meaningful concerns from that article have been addressed with the getrandom syscall on Linux, introduced a few months after this article was written: https://lwn.net/Articles/606141/ https://lwn.net/Articles/606141/ Perhaps we should start saying "getrandom" / "getentropy" instead of "/dev/urandom", but they're the same underlying CSPRNG (although getrandom has the distinct advantage of allowing you to tell if the urandom pool has been initialized, which /dev/urandom doesn't let you do), so I can understand being sloppy with usage. I would sort of assume anyone in a position to patch OpenSSL's RNG either upstream or in a distro is aware of getrandom and why it exists, but maybe that's a bad assumption.
  • ryuuchin 11y ago
    I forgot about the new getrandom syscall but yes that would be preferred if supported.
• maxerickson 11y ago
  That article says //Continue filling with other sources where it should say //exit with an error.