[issue26839] Python 3.5 running on Linux kernel 3.17+ can block at startup or on importing the random module on getrandom()

[Donald Stufft]

Donald Stufft added the comment:

What I'm trying to tell you is that /dev/random is a bad implementation and practically every cryptographer agrees that everyone should use /dev/urandom and they all also agree that on Linux /dev/urandom has a bad wart of giving bad randomness at the start of the system. The behavior of getrandom is a fix to that. In addition, almost nobody needs hardware RNG, /dev/urandom (minus the intialization problem on Linux) is the right answer for almost every single application (and if it's not the right answer, you're a cryptographer who knows that it's not the right answer). On most systems, /dev/random and /dev/urandom have the exact same behavior (which is the behavior of getrandom()-- blocks on intialization, otherwise doens't), it's just linux being brain dead here.

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue26839>
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