Re: [RFC] [VOTE] Vote open for reliable user-land CSPRNG

On 15/03/2015 04:23, Sammy Kaye Powers wrote:

A two week discussion period has been held for the reliable user-land CSPRNG RFC to add random_bytes() and random_int(). The RFC has now been moved into voting. https://wiki.php.net/rfc/easy_userland_csprng There was some discussion of prefixing the function names with crypto_*() but there are a few reasons we decided against this: 1) There is a crypto pecl extension, so the pseudo-namespace might cause confusion. 2) We want to work on a fully featured crypto framework for 7.1, and crypto_* is a good prefix for that, so again, we don't want to mix things up.

Disclaimer: I do know a little about security, but I am not a crypto-expert by any means. If I'm saying something silly, just let me know ;) I want to vote yes, but naming is something that scares me a bit. Without any indication that it's CSPRNG, people might start using it even when unnecessary, and I'd be worried about potential negative effects, such as exhausting the entropy pool. It's probably more of a documentation problem, but we know many won't read the docs and a "hint" in the function name could help guiding users. For example, it would be overkill to use random_int() to randomly pick the content of a boxes at each reload of a web page, but if what I need is a *random int*, then random_int() seems a far better choice than some obscure rand() or mt_rand(). Or in the poker deck example, wouldn't it be enough just to seed mt_srand with a crypto-secure number to remove the biasing and using mt_rand to shuffle the deck? Cheers -- Matteo Beccati Development & Consulting - http://www.beccati.com/