Re: Fw: Random strings

"Joe Conway" <joseph(dot)conway(at)home(dot)com> writes:

> > Having said that, I'm not married to the idea that we should provide
> access
> > to both /dev/random and /dev/urandom. I'd be happy to roll another patch,
> > limited to just urandom, and renaming the function if you feel strongly
> > about it. (should we move this discussion back to hackers to get a wider
> > audience?)

There was a long discussion on linux-kernel recently about the
difference between 'random' and 'urandom'. The upshot seemed to be
that 'urandom' is Good Enough in 99% of the cases, since (as long as
the generator is seeded well at startup) attackers would have to break
SHA1 in order to predict the output from it. If someone has the
resources to do that you're basically screwed anyhow...

-Doug
--
Free Dmitry Sklyarov!
http://www.freesklyarov.org/

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