Comment by strenholme

>>>when I tried it in the latest version of clang on godbolt, that it is eliminating the seeding of the entropy pool<<<

This is an unverified claim. My own testing does not show TCC, GCC, nor clang “optimizing out” the code using uninitialized memory as an entropy pool.

The full test is here: https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS/tree/master/deadwood-githu...

In summary: On Ubuntu, and in clang at higher levels of optimization, the uninitialized memory is made 0s, but the cryptographic pseudo random number generator still runs.

Tests have been done against TCC, GCC, clang, as well as GCC and clang in Cygwin. As an aside, uninitialized memory does seem to give a little bit of entropy with GCC in cygwin, which indicates it probably did back in 2007 when I originally wrote that code (it doesn’t these days with clang with optimization, nor in Ubuntu, which is why I use clock_gettime() as a second possible source of entropy instead of uninitialized memory)

I take claims of security holes in my software seriously, and this isn’t the first time someone made a claim of a real-world security problem, I tested the claim, and was unable to reproduce the alleged security hole in my code.