Re:Cracking random number generators (xoroshiro128+)
by sanxiyn on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @03:37PM
(#15075670)
This is indeed a tragedy, because it could have been easily avoided by including LCG in microbenchmarks. LCG is less than ten lines, so even for very short microbenchmarks including RNG is very feasible. Alas, I guess such reasonable people don't write microbenchmarks in the first place.
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Re:Cracking random number generators (xoroshiro128+)
by tptacek on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @04:05PM
(#15075902)
I understand the "broken benchmarks" problem and I acknowledge that there are some cases that are so demanding and have such low security sensitivity that it makes sense to have an LCG in the standard library.
But I stand by my argument that the default platform RNG should be a CSPRNG, and that developers should reach for a CSPRNG by default.
Which makes all the attention we've been giving to stuff like xoroshiro128+ and PCG pretty confusing to me. It feels like people arguing very earnestly about non-problems, while ignoring a huge problem in our standard libraries.