

All Internal States Of Erlang/OTP Random Module Are Practically Computable - signa11
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2014-December/082254.html

======
qohen
In case anyone's concerned, Erlang's _random_ module is not meant to be used
for cryptographic purposes.

Quoting from a follow-up msg [0] by Anthony Ramine in that thread:

 _The Erlang documentation says:

> It should be noted that this random number generator is not
> cryptographically strong. If a strong cryptographic random number generator
> is needed for example crypto:rand_bytes/1 could be used instead.

I am not sure I understand the alarming tone._

(Here's the Erlang docs page for the random module being referred to: [1]).

And, for a really comprehensive (and thus a bit long) look at random-number
generation and Erlang, the next msg after in the thread [2], by Jesper Louis
Andersen is worth reading.

[0] [http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-
questions/2014-December/0...](http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-
questions/2014-December/082260.html)

[1]
[http://erlang.org/doc/man/random.html](http://erlang.org/doc/man/random.html)

[2] [http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-
questions/2014-December/0...](http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-
questions/2014-December/082262.html)

