class SplittableRandom

[Kasper Nielsen]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 5:10 PM, Guy Steele <guy.steele at oracle.com> wrote:

>
> On Jul 19, 2013, at 1:05 AM, Kasper Nielsen <kasperni at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks so much for your feedback!  Your points are well taken.
>
> I agree that this is a problem, and in fact have already looked at ways to
> get
> other environmental information to mix into the initial seed.  The problem
> is making it Write Once, Run Anywhere---what environmental information
> other than time-of-day is reliably available on all platforms?


Adding a high quality PRNG that does not have a quality initial default
seed makes no sense. It is highly unlikely that even power users will be
able to come up with a better seed than whatever we figure out.

Using a shared static SecureRandom.generateSeed() to generate the seed is
probably the easiest way to get a good seed that is portable.
Or maybe
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8/jdk/file/tip/src/share/classes/sun/security/provider/SeedGenerator.java
can be used in some way. See also this JEP http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/123

- Kasper