[PATCH] Give a useful meaning to arc4random_uniform(0);
Alejandro Colomar
alx.manpages@gmail.com
Sat Dec 31 02:36:54 GMT 2022
Special-casing it in the implementation to return 0 was useless.
Instead, considering 0 as the value after UINT32_MAX has the property
that it allows implementing the following function without any
special cases:
uint32_t
arc4random_range(uint32_t min, uint32_t max)
{
return arc4random_uniform(max - min + 1) + min;
}
This works for any values of min and max (as long as min <= max, of
course), even for (0, UINT32_MAX).
Oh, and the implementation of arc4random_uniform(3) is now 2 lines
simpler. :)
This will work with the current implementation because powerof2(3) will
also consider 0 as a power of 2. See powerof2(3):
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/param.h>
int powerof2(x);
DESCRIPTION
This macro returns true if x is a power of 2, and false
otherwise.
0 is considered a power of 2. This can make sense con‐
sidering wrapping of unsigned integers, and has interest‐
ing properties.
Cc: Theo de Raadt <deraadt@theos.com>
Cc: Todd C. Miller <Todd.Miller@sudo.ws>
Cc: "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@zx2c4.com>
Cc: Cristian Rodríguez <crrodriguez@opensuse.org>
Cc: Adhemerval Zanella <adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org>
Cc: Yann Droneaud <ydroneaud@opteya.com>
Cc: Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>
Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>
---
Hi,
I CCd Theo and Todd, because theirs is the original implementation, and
while this is a useful feature (IMO), it wouldn't make sense to do it
without consensus with other implementations, and especially with the
original implementation.
I found this useful for shadow, where the existing code had a function
that produced a "random" value within a range, but due to the bogus
implementation, it had bias for higher values. Implementing a *_range()
variant in terms of *_uniform() made it really simple, but the
*_uniform() function needed to do something useful for 0 for that to
work.
Cheers,
Alex
stdlib/arc4random_uniform.c | 10 ++++------
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
diff --git a/stdlib/arc4random_uniform.c b/stdlib/arc4random_uniform.c
index 5aa98d1c13..1cd52c0d1c 100644
--- a/stdlib/arc4random_uniform.c
+++ b/stdlib/arc4random_uniform.c
@@ -29,15 +29,13 @@
the asked range after range adjustment.
The algorithm avoids modulo and divide operations, which might be costly
- depending on the architecture. */
+ depending on the architecture.
+
+ 0 is treated as if it were UINT32_MAX + 1, and so arc4random_uniform(0)
+ is equivalent to arc4random(). */
uint32_t
__arc4random_uniform (uint32_t n)
{
- if (n <= 1)
- /* There is no valid return value for a zero limit, and 0 is the
- only possible result for limit 1. */
- return 0;
-
/* Powers of two are easy. */
if (powerof2 (n))
return __arc4random () & (n - 1);
--
2.39.0
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