Re: PRNG benchmark results and proposal

[doug () hcsw org]

Hi Brandon,

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 12:45:05AM +0000 or thereabouts, Brandon Enright wrote:
> I went ahead and wrote a little stand-alone C application to test each
> PRNG option we've come up with:

Thanks a lot for doing this.

> So, I propose we change all random number generation to use DNet's PRNG
> at all times.  It is fast, portable C, already included in Nmap, and
> quite a bit higher quality than we actually /need/.

Sounds like a great idea to me for many reasons. Note that dnet still must
be seeded. It uses arandom/urandom on unix and does the right thing on win32
as well.  Maybe it should seed itself with calls to rand(3) on weird platforms
like Mac OS 9, AmigaOS, unix systems without /dev/?random, etc.

> The caching provided by the current get_random_bytes()
> routine is unnecessary overhead if we use dnet.

Agreed. Axe it.

> I'd like someone to weigh in on BSD/GPL licensing conflicts before I
> proceed to either use rand.c or re-write rand.c for nbase_rnd.

As Fyodor mentioned, the BSD license explicitly allows re-licensing so this
is not an issue (make sure the original copyright notice is preserved).
I can't really think of any reason that nbase can't depend on dnet though.
Is nbase really intended to be used outside nmap? However, if it saves a
bunch of screwing around with the build system, I say go ahead and
move rand.c to nbase.

Thanks Brandon!

Doug

PS. Just hax0red another impl. of ISAAC for a project I am working on atm:
http://hcsw.org/downloads/isaac.lisp

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