On September 4, 2015 at 7:08:36 PM, Guido van Rossum (gu...@python.org) wrote: > I'm no expert, but from the bug report and the man page you quoted it does > sound like getentropy() should only be used to seed a PRNG. It also sounds > like reading /dev/[u]random should be considered a PRNG. For evidence, the > man page on OS X says: "The random device produces uniformly distributed > random byte values of potentially high quality." It goes on to describe the > difference between the two on Linux (where urandom produces lower quality > when it runs out of entropy while random apparently blocks). It does sound > like we should not call getentropy() except to get a good seed for our own > PRNG.
I don't recall the difference between getentropy and getrandom but /dev/(u)random are basically the exact same except /dev/random tries to gues how "random" it’s numbers are. The manpage for /dev/(u)random is basically wrong. (See http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/ and http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-random-numbers/). Someone who remembers what getentropy implements would have to chime in on whether we should use it or not, but getrandom is basically a better form of /dev/urandom. ----------------- Donald Stufft PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
