NAME¶

Crypt::Makerand - Perl extension for the truerand library

SYNOPSIS¶

  use Crypt::Makerand;
  $rand = Crypt::Makerand::trand32();

DESCRIPTION¶

Uses the truerand library to generate a random 32 bit number.

The basic idea here is that between clock "skew" and various hard-to-predict OS event arrivals, counting a tight loop will yield a little (maybe a third of a bit or so) of "good" randomness per interval clock tick. This seems to work well even on unloaded machines. If there is a human operator at the machine, you should augment truerand with other measure, like keyboard event timing.

On server machines (e.g., when you need to generate a Diffie-Hellman secret) truerand alone may be good enough.

  unsigned long trand32(void)

AUTHOR¶

The truerand library was developed by Matt Blaze, Jim Reeds, and Jack Lacy. Copyright (c) 1992, 1994 AT&T. This Perl extension was created by Mark Cox, mjc@redhat.com, March 2001.

SEE ALSO¶

perl(1).