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Andrew Ayer

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LibreSSL's PRNG is Unsafe on Linux [Update: LibreSSL fork fix]

Comment by Andrew Ayer

Posted in reply to Comment by Reader Antoine.

This comment is owned by whoever posted it. I am not responsible for it in any way.

From my own selfish perspective, I completely agree with you, since I'm a C++ programmer and I wrap calls to RAND_bytes in a function that checks the return value and throws an exception if it fails. I don't want my programs raising SIGKILL on error. However, I'm all too aware of how cryptographic libraries are used in practice, and since OpenSSL/LibreSSl is a C library, it's all too likely that programmers are going to ignore the return value of RAND_bytes. Fortunately, a missing /dev/urandom is a pretty exceptional error so raising SIGKILL is not too unreasonable.

| Posted on 2014-07-16 at 00:25:43 UTC by Andrew Ayer | Parent | Reply to This

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