STINNER Victor added the comment: "Generating every name consumes about 16 random bytes. This can exhaust the system entropy and slowdown other applications."
Crys and Alex_Gaynor confirmed me on IRC that these two assumptions are both wrong. See for example https://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/ Q: But that's good! /dev/random gives out exactly as much randomness as it has entropy in its pool. /dev/urandom will give you insecure random numbers, even though it has long run out of entropy. A: Fact: No. Even disregarding issues like availability and subsequent manipulation by users, the issue of entropy “running low” is a straw man. About 256 bits of entropy are enough to get computationally secure numbers for a long, long time. -- About performance, well, it's not exactly "wrong" but "inaccurate". Abusing /dev/urandom only hurt other applications which also abuse /dev/urandom. Such use case is very unlikely. * The bad performance of concurrent /dev/urandom reader was analyzed by an old article of 2014, but see comments: http://drsnyder.us/2014/04/16/linux-dev-urandom-and-concurrency.html * The performance issue was fixed in Linux 4.8, https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1e7f583af67be4ff091d0aeb863c649efd7a9112 ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue30030> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
