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Request #47952 Access to OS randomness would be nice
Submitted: 2009-04-11 18:52 UTC Modified: 2009-04-11 19:12 UTC
From: jking at jkingweb dot ca Assigned:
Status: Wont fix Package: Feature/Change Request
PHP Version: 5.2.9 OS:
Private report: No CVE-ID: None
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From: jking at jkingweb dot ca
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 [2009-04-11 18:52 UTC] jking at jkingweb dot ca
Description:
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The other day I wrote a PHP implementation of a spec which mandates using a cryptographically-secure random number generator.  For most Unix systems this is easy (/dev/urandom or /dev/random), but getting access to such a source in PHP for Windows seems impossible.  

I thought it might be beneficial for PHP to expose the best source of randomness availble via fopen("php://random") or some such.  I confess I don't know how difficult this would be to do, but it would certainly be more feasible for PHP itself to pull this off in a cross-platform fashion than for little old me writing software from within PHP.

Reproduce code:
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From manual page: wrappers.php
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 [2009-04-11 19:12 UTC] scottmac@php.net
It's not in the manual yet but you'll find openssl_random_pseudo_bytes() in PHP 5.3 that accesses the underlying PRNG.

We could add this to PHP itself, but I think letting OpenSSL being responsible for this is better in case we make a mistake.
 
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