alt Hacker NewsParent is right. Use of uninitialized memory is UB, and incidentally, the type of UB that the C standard is not working to define, but is relying on sanitizers to find in source programs, since it is considered always a bug.
This entire thread has a lot of "no security issues have ever been found in my code, and I test a lot. Therefore no bugs will ever exist in my code and we're all safe." To see you doing this in an explicitly security-conscious setting is distressing.
If anything, I see assertions like this and juxtaposed with blatant, willful misunderstanding of how C and C compilers work and it does the opposite of inspiring confidence.
Look at CVE-2009-1897; this is the classic example of how C compilers are happy to try to optimize code in the face of UB and lead to worse problems.
> If the above code has any but one of the above 16 outputs
I don't think you understand how insane optimizations in the face of UB can be. Just go look at this issue:
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/174844?utm_sourc...
>>>no security issues have ever been found in my code, and I test a lot. Therefore no bugs will ever exist in my code and we're all safe<<<
That’s not what I have said. 35 issues (mostly minor, but a couple of remote denial of service attacks) have been found with my code in the last 25 years; of those, none have come from the PRNG code I used. Here in the age of AI, I get multiple security reports a year, so the code is being looked at.
With crypto, you can never know for sure the code doesn’t have weaknesses, but one can have confidence in code and algorithms which have been around for years without any weaknesses discovered in them.
My question is: If code being around for years doesn’t build confidence in it being secure, what would it take to build confidence in the code.
What you’re seeing here is two schools of thought: One is the issue with using uninitialized memory, which yes does result in undefined behavior as per the C99 spec—but, back two decades ago when I made that decision, GCC was the only compiler of significance (clang was just released but was not widely used until years later) and its behavior was to put randomish data in undefined allocated memory.
The other is the notion that only Linux Kernel developers can develop a secure PRNG, and obviously I find that attitude very condescending and arrogant.