Question about md_open() and random

[Werner Koch]

On Sat,  8 Jul 2006 14:54, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos said:

> Hmmm, this has the side effect of adding a non deterministic delay
> to other unrelated to randomness functions (because of the lock). 

You can't have a deterministic behaviour in a muli-threaded process.
If it would be deterministic a lock wouldn't be needed.

> Maybe it might be more clear for this function (or a wrapper of it) to 
> become part of the randomness api?

It is intentional because too may crypto library users didn't care
about entropy polling leading to a very weak results.  

BTW, other libraries do the same.



Shalom-Salam,

   Werner