[PATCH v3] Seed random generator in main()

Simo simo at samba.org
Wed Jun 17 07:36:00 MDT 2015


On Wed, 2015-06-17 at 08:23 +0200, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 05:11:37PM +1200, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> > In other parts of Samba we just use the generate_random() function,
> > which avoids needing to think about all this.  We have cryptographic
> > random numbers in Samba, we can just use those for this. 
> > 
> > We set up a PRNG using MD4 over a RC4 stream from 40 bytes of random
> > data.  It isn't the best, but it avoids the bad pattern of using
> > srandom() et al, which will just trigger folks either re-using in more
> > important places or alternately writing to us with 'security' warnings
> > about using it. 
> 
> Seen from another angle: The BSD world seems to settle on
> the arc4random family of functions. There's a libbsd
> replacement on Linux for those. Shouldn't we get rid of our
> own random number generator and just use that, possibly with
> the libbsd code in libreplace?

Why are we not just using urandom ? Why do we want to get in the
business of guaranteeing proper random number generation ????

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce



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