Issue 121677

Summary:	Replace rtl::math::random with the random nuber generator in APR
Product:	Build Tools	Reporter:	Andrea Pescetti <pescetti>
Component:	external prerequisites	Assignee:	AOO issues mailing list <issues>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	issues, orcmid
Version:	4.0.0-dev
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Issue Type:	FEATURE	Latest Confirmation in:	---
Developer Difficulty:	---

Description Andrea Pescetti 2013-01-26 14:13:10 UTC

Replace rtl::math::random with the random nuber generator in APR. We have a
random number generator in SAL that we use for bookmarks in documents and
to seed the PRNG. APR has a crypto grade number generator that could be used
instead. This would add a SAL dependency on APR, but it's likely that APR
has functionality that would be interesting for the SAL module.

[ Credit: this is one of the development tasks suggested by Pedro in
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.ooo.devel/29268 
feel free to ask the development mailing list for more details:
http://openoffice.apache.org/mailing-lists.html ]

Comment 1 orcmid 2013-01-26 19:03:07 UTC

APR?

We need to distinguish between a PRG and a cryptographic-grade random number generator.  PRGs are faster but are often seeded by a crypto-grade RNG value to get going.  (I think Pedro used that characteristic to seed the new PRG for CALC.) A crypto-grade RNG has very different performance characteristics.

That distinction may be meant here, and there is code in SVN that does fairly elaborate things to get some random numbers to fire up a PRG with.  (I'm never sure whether and where code in the SVN is actually used, so don't know if I have seen the SAL one or not.)