On Feb 22, 2011, at 3:26 PM, Bill Frantz wrote: > On 2/22/11 at 1:36 PM, [email protected] (Brendan Eich) wrote: > >> However, Math.random is a source of bugs as Amit Klein has shown, and these >> can't all be fixed by using a better non-CS PRNG underneath Math.random and >> still decimating to an IEEE double in [0, 1]. The use-cases Klein explored >> need both a CS-PRNG and more bits, IIRC. Security experts should correct >> amateur-me if I'm mistaken. > > I'll see if the security expert hat fits. :-)
Thanks. > The random() function in many languages has a useful property which is > incompatible with security. By setting its seed, you can get deterministic > execution of a Monte Carlo algorithm. IANAJSE, but I didn't see a way to set > the seed of Math.random(), so the ECMAScript/Javascript version lacks this > useful property. But, having both a repeatable random function and a secure > random function in a language is certainly reasonable. Browsers have, based on Amit's work, added some automatic reseeding and (before that) switched from a singleton hidden state to state-per-window/iframe. The "API issue" as Erik put it is this: do we need an array of bytes/shorts/ints, potentially a lot of random values; or would the fractional bits of a single IEEE 64-bit double precision result be "good enough". /be _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
