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Investigate/implement Randen RNG #462
Description
The Randen RNG is supposed to be secure, very fast, relatively small state (apparently 264 bytes) and backtracking resistant, which could make it a good candidate for ThreadRng.
It would of course be preferable to have a Rust implementation.
We should further investigate the security claims before use.
Activity
pitdicker commentedon May 16, 2018
On the negative side, it is very new, the paper is even not yet published, it is only fast with hardware support, and I suppose it needs a couple of years to build up trust in it.
Maybe we should hold off on getting exited.
vks commentedon May 17, 2018
According to a Reddit comment, it works for most hardware that is less than 10 years old.
dhardy commentedon May 17, 2018
To quote another Redditor:
Without much security review I don't think it has a lot of use to us (even if it is fast), so opening this is premature I guess.
vks commentedon May 17, 2018
If it is faster than PCG and similar, it is still interesting as a non-CSPRNG!
dhardy commentedon May 17, 2018
Yes, but with the caveat that it is more complicated to implement and has certain hardware dependencies. I'm not saying we won't consider including an implementation in Rand (it's definitely interesting), but it's not of particular interest (and we have too many open issues).
vks commentedon May 17, 2018
Agreed, this issue is kind of a duplicate of #299 anyway.