OpenBSD routes around POSIX

Posted Dec 22, 2014 15:51 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
In reply to: OpenBSD routes around POSIX by JoeBuck
Parent article: OpenBSD routes around POSIX

If you want something that can be replayed, it’s not “random”. You list valid use cases, but I question that they can be use cases for an RNG. Sure, do it, but please don’t call it RNG, not even PRNG. Implementing an LFSR, LCG, etc. is dead easy.

Besides, POSIX doesn’t guarantee reproducibility between exec() anyway…

OpenBSD routes around POSIX

Posted Dec 22, 2014 16:33 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I'm pretty sure that any PRNG given the same inputs will produce the same outputs and that is randomness that is suitable for crypto purposes. The randomness is introduced by seeding with something unpredictable and not knowing how far into the stream you have read not that the values produced will be unpredictable if you know the seed and how many bytes have been read.