From: shyouhei@... Date: 2016-04-15T03:33:46+00:00 Subject: [ruby-core:74959] [Ruby trunk Bug#9569] SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first Issue #9569 has been updated by Shyouhei Urabe. I'm aware that current Linux urandom *happen to* be safe for our needs in current implementation. I'm also skeptical about OpenSSL's code quality in general. The problem preventing me to +1 this request is that I cannot find any statements inside Linux kernel that urandom is *meant* to be used like this. The only description I could find so far is (the argued) manpage, which says otherwise. Does anyone have any pointers that officially describe this device? ---------------------------------------- Bug #9569: SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9569#change-58086 * Author: Corey Csuhta * Status: Rejected * Priority: Normal * Assignee: ruby-core * ruby -v: * Backport: ---------------------------------------- Right now, `SecureRandom.random_bytes` tries to detect an OpenSSL to use before it tries to detect `/dev/urandom`. I think it should be the other way around. In both cases, you just need random bytes to unpack, so SecureRandom could skip the middleman (and [second point of failure](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-random-numbers/)) and just talk to `/dev/urandom` directly if it's available. Is this a case of just re-ordering the two code chunks so that `/dev/urandom` is tried first? Relevant lines: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/lib/securerandom.rb#L59-L90 -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/ Unsubscribe: