in reply to Rex2 Cryptographic Random Numbers
in thread Cryptographic Random Numbers

What you believe is right ;-)

Any programmer can just read a few megs from /dev/urandom, write it to a file (dd is a handy utility to achieve quick results) and try to gzip or bzip it. If the file can be compressed with a high ratio it is a shame for the urandom coders, if not then it is a shame for gzip or bzip coders (and refreshing for crypto-minded programmers ;-) (ok, ok, just a joke :)

To put it shortly: You already have the random numbers in kernel (I mean Linux).

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Re: Re: Rex2 Cryptographic Random Numbers
by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Jul 09, 2003 at 17:58 UTC
    To put it shortly: You already have the random numbers in kernel (I mean Linux).

    And my musing was to have a source for all Perl programs, regardless of platform.

    A good PRNG requires a few different entropy sources. Reading from /dev/urandom is just one. If that device already implements something like Yarrow, that's another story.

[reply]
      According to its man page it implements the Yarrow PRNG algorithm.
[reply]

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