Library_submissions and Call for Maintainers

[Gershom B]

On February 28, 2015 at 11:39:48 PM, Edward Kmett (ekmett at gmail.com) wrote:
> * random
>  
> We've had some truly excellent work done over the last couple of years on
> how to deal with "splitting" a random number generator in a
> cryptographically sound manner. I spent some time cleaning up a few
> outstanding issues for this package personally over the summer, but have
> not had nearly enough time to devote to the issue of how to integrate the
> outcome of the recent research on splitting, while simultaneously caring
> about performance and soundness.

With regards to random, rather than making System.Random crypographically sound (which, as I understand it, could require changes to the API), there is a “halfway house” approach — implementation of the SplitMix algorithm of Steele, Lea and Flood [1]. This algorithm, now included in Java JDK8, claims that it is a "version of the purely functional API used in the Haskell library for over a decade, but SplitMix is faster and produces pseudorandom sequences of higher quality.”

I am not volunteering to work on such a project, but it seems like it could not only be worthwhile, but quite a bit of fun for somebody with the right inclination.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2660195&CFID=630640078&CFTOKEN=34009864

Cheers,
Gershom