Re: Improving mt_rand() seed

On 2 Feb 2017, at 8:24, Christoph M. Becker wrote:

On 02.02.2017 at 12:51, Yasuo Ohgaki wrote:

Although users must never do this, but there are codes that generate random password/access key by mt_rand().

There is also code that stores clear text passwords. How would you prevent that? IMHO, if users don't care to read the docs[1], it's their fault, and we shouldn't waste our time to fix their bugs. [1] <http://php.net/manual/en/function.mt-rand.php>

We cannot fix these bugs without making mt_rand a CSPRNG, which means it is no longer mt_rand. All we can do is mitigate the problem (to some unknowable extent) by seeding mt_rand from php_random_bytes. I don't care if we do this or not so long as the change is simple and BC, i.e. 32-bit seed that falls back to something else if php_random_bytes fails. Tom