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

Tim Peters tim.peters at gmail.com
Sat Jun 11 22:21:41 EDT 2016 
[Sebastian Krause]
> ...
> Ideally I would only want to use the random module for
> non-secure and (in 3.6) the secrets module (which could block) for
> secure random data and never bother with os.urandom (and knowing how
> it behaves). But then those modules should probably get new
> functions to directly return bytes.

`secrets.token_bytes()` does just that, and other token_XXX()
functions return bytes too but with different spellings (e.g., if you
want, with the byte values represented as ASCII hex digits)..

I believe everyone agrees token_bytes() will potentially block in 3.6
(along with all the other `secrets` facilities) on platforms
supporting getrandom().

You're right that `random` doesn't expose such a function, and that
the closest it gets is .getrandbits() (which returns a potentially
giant int).  So far, nobody has proposed adding new functions to
`random`.
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