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[Python-Dev] BDFL ruling request: should we block forever waiting for high-quality random bits?

Sebastian Krause sebastian at realpath.org
Fri Jun 10 13:01:23 EDT 2016 
Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> I just don't like the potentially blocking behavior, and experts' opinions
> seem to widely vary on how insecure the fallback bits really are, how
> likely you are to find yourself in that situation, and how probable an
> exploit would be.

This is not just a theoretical problem being discussed by security
experts that *could* be exploited, there have already been multiple
real-life cases of devices (mostly embedded Linux machines)
generating predicatable SSH keys because they read from an
uninitialized /dev/urandom at first boot. Most recently in the
Raspbian distribution for the Raspberry Pi:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=126892

At least in 3.6 there should be obvious way to get random data that
*always* guarantees to be secure and either fails or blocks if it
can't guarantee that.

Sebastian
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