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by SV_BubbleTime 795 days ago
I’m over here wondering why someone would want deterministic nonces.

Isn’t it kind of the point to just roll random numbers? When would you calculate?

1 comments

It says in the OP. Windows at the time did not provide a cryptographic quality random number source.
I saw that, and wondered why PuTTY didn't contain it's own good CSPRNG, something like Fortuna, if Windows didn't offer one.
You still need a source of entropy, which is easier for an OS. An app has to resort to the user moving the mouse or bashing keys, which is a worse UX, although I guess they did that for actual key generation (if PuTTY did that) but it would be annoying to do it every time you made a connection.