3 ms·
Well, crypto isn't my specialty, so I always tread lightly when commenting about it. My hand-wavey understanding is that CSPRNGs are deterministic but not pred
by sevensor 9y ago
Well, crypto isn't my specialty, so I always tread lightly when commenting about it. My hand-wavey understanding is that CSPRNGs are deterministic but not predictable, and that actual entropy is used to seed them. Going even further out on a limb, I think this is supposed to be the difference between /dev/urandom (CSPRNG) and /dev/random (actual entropy.) If I have that wrong, I'd appreciate correction by somebody in the know.
- vlovich123 9y agoYou're correct that CSPRNGs themselves are deterministic. I probably just misread what you were saying. As for dev/urandom vs /dev/random that's not really true. On Linux there's kind of a historical artifact of why they're different (blocking vs non-blocking API) but on OSX /dev/urandom is a symlink to /dev/random.