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Cc: Niklas Keller <me@kelunik.com>
Message-ID: <edbcdcaa-8a57-d598-2bf2-234dff7c9799@gmx.de>
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2016 19:18:43 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] RNG fixes
From: cmbecker69@gmx.de (Christoph Becker)

On 16.06.2016 at 20:55, Fleshgrinder wrote:

> Education is a hard problem that the whole world is struggling with. We
> will never achieve it. We will especially not achieve convincing people
> of legacy software to change. Heck, we cannot even convince anyone here
> to change legacy stuff. Hence, if rand and friends stay, they will
> continue to help people to produce insecure software.

Consequently, we should remove rot13() as well, see
<http://news.php.net/php.notes/205744>.  And we shouldn't stop there as
include(_once), require(_once), file_get_contents() and readfile() bear
the risk of file inclusion vulnerabilities … ;)

In my opinion, our job when designing the language and the core
libraries is not to avoid (or remove) features that can be used to
produce insecure software, but rather to offer additional features that
make it easier to produce secure software, and to document potential
issues and hint at better alternatives.  random_*() is such an addition,
and I don't see an urgent need to get rid of (mt_)rand().

-- 
Christoph M. Becker