for what it is worth, i agree with part of John M. Dlugosz's suggestion: not necessarily via the perl kernel, but certainly via a standard module which can be used to collect entropy in a platform independent manner.

it is surprisingly difficult to find libraries that do this. i tried yarrow, which has a good entropy collector, and good documentation, from which i intended to parrot unmercifully, but the entropy collecting source given is windows-specific. and /dev/random is great if you have a linux box, but obviously not otherwise.

re: math::trulyrandom, the readme itself says, in a rather plaintive & guilty tone, something like "statistical tests should be performed on the output, but the slowness of the module is problematic". i find it hard to believe that statistical tests are absent, given how easy it is to actually perform the tests with something like ent. and besides, it works just for unixen.

i find myself again bemoaning the fact that it is quite hard to find truly cross platform cryptographic code in perl. so yes, give us a cross-platform entropy source. please! just don't put it in the kernel.

ttfn,

wufnik

...in the world of the mules there are no rules