Steven D'Aprano wrote:
- Linux /dev/urandom doesn't block, but it might return predictable, poor-quality pseudo-random bytes (i.e. a potential exploit); - Other OSes may block for potentially many minutes (i.e. a potential DOS).
It's even possible that it could block *forever*. There was a case here recently in the cosc dept where students were running Clojure programs in a virtual machine environment. When they updated to a newer version of Clojure, everyone's programs started hanging on startup. It turned out the Clojure library was initialising its RNG from /dev/random, and the VM didn't have any real spinning disks or other devices to provide entropy. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com