Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: Tempfile vulnerabilities


From: wk () GNUPG ORG (Werner Koch)
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 09:27:32 +0100


On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Grant Taylor wrote:

         open RAN, "/dev/random" || die;
         read(RAN,$foo,16);
         close RAN;
         $file = '/tmp/autobuse' . unpack('H16',$foo);

Please, never use /dev/random or /dev/urandom for such purposes.

Aside the fact, that it does not help much in what you want to achieve
it is a desaster to system performance because it empties the system's
entropy pool and wastes precious entropy for unneeded things.

Crypto software _really_ needs these random numbers.


--
Werner Koch at guug.de           www.gnupg.org           keyid 621CC013

     Boycott Amazon!  -  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html



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