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Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2015 10:44:04 -0500
To: php-internals <internals@lists.php.net>,
	Yasuo Ohgaki <yohgaki@ohgaki.net>,
	Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com>
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Thread-Topic: [PHP-DEV] Security changes in PHP 7
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Security changes in PHP 7
From: fsb@thefsb.org (Tom Worster)

Hi Yasuo, Pierre,

Thank you both for the updates.

I expect the vote to remove mcrypt can be shifted towards "yes" if some
campaigning effort is made. I made a start in another thread.

Assuming that mcrypt goes, as it should, we are left with a problem. The
PHP user doesn't have a platform-independent way to get pseudo-random
bytes for crypto. OpenSSL's RNG is not to be trusted. If the user knows
this (I wouldn't bet on it) then she has to resort to accessing the
platform RNG directly.

On Unix-like system's it is technically easy but much confusion is caused
by the Linux man page with its myth that urandom is unsafe for crypto.

On Windows I just have no idea how the user might proceed.

So I really think the "Reliable, userfriendly RNG APIs" idea in the wiki
is very important.

Tom