Documentation

Get a specific number of bytes of cryptographically secure random data using the *system-specific* sources. (As of 0.4. Versions <0.4 mixed system and hardware sources)

The returned random value is considered cryptographically secure but not true entropy.

On some platforms this requires a file handle which can lead to resource exhaustion in some situations.

Get a specific number of bytes of cryptographically secure random data using a supported *hardware* random bit generator.

If there is no hardware random number generator then Nothing is returned. If any call returns non-Nothing then it should never be Nothing unless there has been a hardware failure.

If trust of the CPU allows it and no context switching is important, a bias to the hardware rng with system rng as fall back is trivial:

let fastRandom nr = maybe (getEntropy nr) pure =<< getHardwareEntropy nr

The old, <0.4, behavior is possible using xor from Bits:

let oldRandom nr =
     do hwRnd  maybe (replicate nr 0) BS.unpack <$ getHardwareEntropy nr
        sysRnd BS.unpack <$ getEntropy nr
        pure $ BS.pack $ zipWith xor sysRnd hwRnd

A less maliable mixing can be accomplished by replacing xor with a composition of concat and cryptographic hash.

Handle for manual resource management

Open a CryptHandle

Read random data from a CryptHandle

Close the CryptHandle