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by geofft 3722 days ago
... I'm not sure I can take an article seriously that suggests "but what if the attacker can modify files in /dev?".

In any case, the meaningful concerns from that article have been addressed with the getrandom syscall on Linux, introduced a few months after this article was written: https://lwn.net/Articles/606141/

Perhaps we should start saying "getrandom" / "getentropy" instead of "/dev/urandom", but they're the same underlying CSPRNG (although getrandom has the distinct advantage of allowing you to tell if the urandom pool has been initialized, which /dev/urandom doesn't let you do), so I can understand being sloppy with usage. I would sort of assume anyone in a position to patch OpenSSL's RNG either upstream or in a distro is aware of getrandom and why it exists, but maybe that's a bad assumption.

1 comments

I forgot about the new getrandom syscall but yes that would be preferred if supported.