Mark Murray wrote:
>
> > > What is the purpose of this? It looks hugely wasteful to me. If you
> > > really need a single random bit, it is not good to waste a block of
> > > hard-gained gryptographic randomness; can you not use a pseudo-random
> > > bit-generator?
> >
> > arc4random() does not consume entropy except the first time it is called
> > and when explicitly reseeded through arc4random_stir(). Apart from that
> > it's a deterministic function (the arc4 stream cipher), but it's still a
> > reasonably good cryptographic PRNG because arc4 is a cryptographically
> > strong algorithm.
>
> But I repeat myself; are you still intending to use cryptographic security
> for one bit? What does that buy you? An attacker will laugh at the waste
> of resources that went into a coin-flip :-). Much better is to use something
> cheaper like time-of-day XOR 1 << whatever.
Pseudo random numbers are so cheap (or they should be) that you
just don't want to try and 'optimize' here. It is much better to
be conservative and use a good PRNG until it *proves* to be very
problematic.
Cheers,
Jeroen
--
Jeroen C. van Gelderen o _ _ _
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