Random number generators

[Mehmet Erol Sanliturk]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 11:10 AM, Pedro Giffuni <pfg at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Hi Dennis;
>
> On 03/17/15 12:22, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
>
>> There is a lot of discussion about qualities of Random Number generators
>> on cryptography lists.  MT is not a good choice for that, but it might not
>> need to be important for other applications.
>>
>> There has been some recent work, PCG, that has attracted some attention, <
>> http://www.pcg-random.org/>.  There are good videos explaining what the
>> approach is about as well.  PCG also has implementations in C.  (It is
>> under the Apache License 2.0 too: <https://github.com/imneme/pcg-c-basic>
>> for a minimal family and <https://github.com/imneme/pcg-c> for ones with
>> extended capabilities.)
>>
>> The analysis of what does and doesn't work, and how passing diehard is
>> too easy, is also valuable.
>>
>> If you are serious about crypto grade randomness, libc is probably not
>> the answer.  Generally, I don't think reliance on a single generator for
>> general purpose use and for cryptographic quality is going to work well.
>> This is a very context-sensitive situation and addressing specific threat
>> models against cryptographic PRGs is a very different matter from wanting
>> unpredictable and good quality pseudo-randoms for simulations and other
>> purposes.
>>
>
> The pcg-random link seems to be down now but for crypto, we have
> arc4random(3) which is pretty good and about to be improved further.
>
> Pedro.
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>

Three of the above links are accessible from here at Izmir , in Turkey .

Thank you very much .


Mehmet Erol Sanliturk