[edk2-devel] why does RAND_add() take "randomness" as a "double"?

[Ard Biesheuvel]

(remove openssl user list)

On Wed, 22 May 2019 at 03:48, Paul Dale <paul.dale at oracle.com> wrote:
>
> Double makes sense.  Entropy is often estimated as a real value.
>
> E.g. we have the aforementioned coin flipper feeding data serially.
> Adding each bit sequentially means 0.125 bytes of entropy per call.
>
> Not the best example....
>

It looks like the people saying double is a good idea didn't actually
look at the code. The double argument is compared to a size_t cast to
double, and assigned that same value under some conditions.

I think the problem is that the double argument is part of the RAND
API, so they cannot easily change it.

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