Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:72364
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain cubiclesoft.com designates 74.208.44.107 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <52F485C1.4010208@cubiclesoft.com>
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2014 00:05:37 -0700
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:11.0) Gecko/20120327 Thunderbird/11.0.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: PHP Development <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Make mcrypt_create_iv() an alias and move the code into /ext/standard
From: thruska@cubiclesoft.com (Thomas Hruska)

mcrypt_create_iv() is the cleanest access to a universal system-level 
primitive that supports both /dev/urandom and 
php_win32_get_random_bytes() under the hood.  Unfortunately, it resides 
in /ext/mcrypt and the mcrypt extension isn't always enabled/available 
(nor should it be).  At any rate, it is quite odd that the function 
php_win32_get_random_bytes() is compiled into the core of PHP by default 
under Windows but there's currently no way to get at it except through 
an extension.  There's good code in mcrypt_create_iv() that is 
significantly useful outside of the rest of that extension and it isn't 
actually dependent upon libmcrypt for proper operation.

Moving the guts of this non-dependent function into the core would allow 
mcrypt_create_iv() to just become an alias.  The new userland function 
could be located in /ext/standard/rand.c and have an uncreative name 
like rand_bytes().

-- 
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President

I've got great, time saving software that you will find useful.

http://cubiclesoft.com/