[erlang-questions] Multi-precision math, random number generator entropy, various other questions

Greg Perry Greg.Perry@REDACTED
Sun May 31 22:42:56 CEST 2009


Hi Per,

>And where did you get the idea that division doesn't work for bignums?

My mistake, I was using the wrong operator for division (/ instead of
div).

>So you've already figured out that they are constants - does it matter
where the constants come from?

No not at all, just trying to understand more about the quality of the
internal random function in Erlang and if it would be suitable for
cryptographic purposes or not.

>The standard implementation of Erlang is a user level process running
on top of an OS that these days almost always has a quality
implementation of entropy gathering - any attempt to re-implement that
in the Erlang runtime is guaranteed to result in something with inferior
quality.

Unfortunately that depends on the host OS' RNG, Linux and most BSD
variants have quality entropy gathering and RNG functions; Windows
variants not so much.

Regards

Greg



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