[ruby-core:75342] [Ruby trunk Bug#9569] SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first

Issue #9569 has been updated by Martin D端rst.


Chris MacNaughton wrote:
> Eric Wong wrote:
> > Has anybody here brought up the issue to the OpenSSL team to get
> >  OpenSSL fixed?

> Yes: https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/898

And on that bug, the speed issue was mentioned, too, like at https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9569#note-21.

So I see several ways forward for this:

1) Get OpenSSL to fix it. It would definitely benefit more people than just Ruby users.

2) Convince Ruby committers that urandom can be used without speed problems on *all* relevant platforms and for *all* relevant application.

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Bug #9569: SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9569#change-58471

* Author: Corey Csuhta
* Status: Rejected
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: ruby-core
* ruby -v: 
* Backport: 
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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



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