4 ms·

Whenever I read these discussions, I always see references to BSD vs Linux. The BSD "way" seems cleaner to me, but I'm certainly no expert. But does anyone kno

• asveikau 7y ago
  On Windows, I believe RtlGenRandom is pretty similar to getrandom() etc. Including the "it won't fail due to failure to open a device" aspect.
• comex 7y ago
  On macOS, /dev/random never blocks. From the beginning up until 2014 or so, this was blatantly insecure: the only initial entropy was the system clock! In microseconds, not seconds, thankfully, but that's still a very low amount of entropy. securityd in userland would send the kernel more entropy once it came up, but before that point, /dev/random would just spew low-quality random numbers. Since 2014, however, macOS has expected to get a random seed from the bootloader, which in turn gets it from rdrand if available, or some complicated timer stuff if not. I'm not sure how secure the latter is, but as of Mojave, there are no longer any supported Macs without rdrand, making the issue moot...