Re: [Chicken-hackers] Patch to use better PRNG on BSD's

[Thomas Chust]

On Wed, 2012-04-11 at 09:47 -0500, Jim Ursetto wrote:
> Currently the only reason a better PRNG is needed in core
> is because of the new hash table randomization stuff that
> is also in core (as of the upcoming Chicken 4.8).
> User code can use any one of the random eggs.
> Cryptographic quality is probably overkill.
> 
> On Apr 11, 2012, at 6:21 AM, Thomas Chust wrote:
> 
> > If we really wanted to include a PRNG in the CHICKEN distribution that
> > should satisfy any definition of "good", I would suggest to use a modern
> > stream cipher with high throughput, for example SOSEMANUK [1]. But I'm
> > not sure whether a suite of cryptographic functions is really something
> > that must be included in a language's standard library.
> 

Hello,

by the way, SOSEMANUK and other modern stream ciphers reach about one
order of magnitude higher data output rate than RC4 on current hardware
with 32 or more bits per register. And the speed of the PRNG can easily
become an issue, even if it is just used to salt hash tables. The
quality of the random data is also an issue if the hash tables are not
resalted frequently and the period length of the generator is an issue
if they are resalted frequently.

Probably it wouldn't hurt at all to pick a really good generator!

Ciao,
Thomas


-- 
When C++ is your hammer, every problem looks like your thumb.