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To be fair, the failures in that article are from userspace CSPRNGs that got even that part wrong. Debian's problem was commenting out the lines that seeded the RNG from /dev/urandom, and Android's problem was developers that used the RNG unseeded. They trouble wasn't re-seeding -- they weren't seeding in the first place.

However, if we are going to decide as an industry that we need a userspace CSPRNG, it's not that hard of a job to write a single, high-quality, cross-platform implementation of a seeded-once CSPRNG that introduces no vulnerabilities beyond the kernel CSPRNG.




You could do that, but the code to do something like create an instance of ChaCha20, fill the parameters from urandom, and pull numbers from it is a handful of trivial lines.




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