[ruby-core:79023] [Ruby trunk Bug#9569] SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first

Issue #9569 has been updated by Shyouhei Urabe.


Bart de Water wrote:
> Akira Tanaka wrote:
> > Please update the man page first, if it is really out-dated.
> 
> This has happened with the Linux 4.09 

Very good news.  Thank you for letting us know this.

Now I think we have no reason to avoid /dev/urandom.  It doesn't immediately mean OpenSSL became bad but I understand the OP's motivation to "skip the middleman".  Because we already use getrandom(2) when available (see also Delan's comment #29), I think it's OK to simply skip OpenSSL and let securerandom try the system call first.

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Bug #9569: SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9569#change-62431

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