> what you don't want are a bunch of knobs and dials. What you generally need is a guarantee that your RNG interface is feeding you data from the system secure

> what you don't want are a bunch of knobs and dials. What you generally need is a guarantee that your RNG interface is feeding you data from the system secure random number generator The two are not necessarily incompatible. The distributions in the C++ standard library are not married to the standard engines. You can quite straightforwardly write an engine that uses urandom internally and which is compatible with the standard distributions; see the last couple dozen lines of libc++'s random.cpp. Now, whether there are instances where using a statistical adapter with cryptographically secure random numbers is appropriate is another question, and one which I am not qualified to answer. However, such adapters as std::uniform_int_distribution and std::independent_bits_engine, if it can be verified that they are implemented correctly (and that is admittedly a big "if"), would probably still be useful.