[ruby-core:75780] [Ruby trunk Bug#9569] SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first

Issue #9569 has been updated by Shyouhei Urabe.


Thank you for your interesting idea of OpenSSL being insecure.  If you really believe so (and think you are a security expert), what you should do is actually fixing OpenSSL, not ranting here.

Why I think it's OK to wait for upstream fix (be they Linux manpage or OpenSSL or whatever) is that the problem people argue is theoretical at worst.  I don't think there is actual flaw yet.  That doesn't mean there will never be, but I see no reason to urgent-fix this.  If there is a real threat today, the picture drastically changes.  Is there?

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Bug #9569: SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9569#change-58966

* Author: Corey Csuhta
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* 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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