[Haskell-cafe] random library

[William Yager]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 11:23 PM, Thomas DuBuisson <
thomas.dubuisson at gmail.com> wrote:

> The hash drbg from the drbg package should meet your needs. Deterministic,
> pure Haskell except the actual hash function.
>
>
I was looking at this recently; may I ask why drbg and crypto-api even
bother to expose the possibility of CSPRNGs "running out" of entropy? This
is not thought to be a concern on any cryptographically sound primitive,
and it substantially complicates both the implementation and the
user-facing API. The currently selected reseed interval of 2^48 is already
large enough that it might as well not be there; it's too large to provide
forward secrecy and almost large enough that you'll never hit it.

If you're looking for a more reputable source for this claim, there is a
wealth of literature on the current best practices for OS-level CSPRNGs. In
particular, both Linux (via the new getrandom(2) API) and the BSDs (via the
block device API which has done the right thing for a long time) now have
the behavior of waiting for ~256 bits of initial entropy and then providing
unlimited random bytes forever without ever blocking or requiring a reseed.

Might I suggest in a future revision of the drbg/crypto-api libraries
dropping all mentions of "Either" from the CryptoRandomGen typeclass API,
except maybe "newGen"? I think this would make your job a lot easier *and*
make the library a lot easier to consume (e.g. via RandT).

--Will
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