matbess

Nice! Thanks

I suspected that “politics” was going to end up being the answer to my question. Simply because this seems to be a very contentious issue, even if it doesn’t need to be.

Edit: Thanks for the link!

This article naturally leads to a question that I didn’t see addressed, perhaps you can answer it here:

If it’s unnecessary to ever prefer /dev/random to urandom, then why does /dev/random’s current blocking implementation still exist? Surely between all of the kernel developers, between all of the Unix-ish OS’s, over the last couple of decades would have realized that /dev/random should simply act like /dev/urandom?

Well written post, I enjoyed it, it makes sense.

The part tearing into the man page was especially excellent!

Following your point a little further.. the thought of updating the man pages with warnings like the following made me laugh:

“AES, SHA-3, RSA, Diffie-Hellman, Elliptic curves, and all those crypto packages you're using, OpenSSL, GnuTLS, Keyczar, your operating system's crypto API, are all theoretically vulnerable to a cryptographic attack. Knowledge of how to do this is not available in the current unclassified literature, but it is theoretically possible that such an attack may exist. If this is a concern in your application, do not use them.”