Re: [patch] random: make get_random_int() more random

[Matt Mackall]

On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 10:51:45PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> Linus's patch is a marked improvement, and it is really what we need 
> here mostly.

No one's arguing that it isn't an improvement. But -15 years of
research- points to MD4 (let alone **half**MD4) being insufficient. To
counter that, two non-cryptanalysts have presented nothing beyond "it
seems strong enough to me" and "it passes a meaningless test". Pardon
me if I'm not satisfied by that.

> We cannot afford true physical randomness (it's too expensive to get 
> and not all hw has it), and even a 'good' PRNG is pretty expensive. 

And what of my suggestion (multiple times now) to replace halfMD4 with
SHA1? Or AES. Or any cryptographic primitive that's not known to be
completely worthless?

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.
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