On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 12:39 AM, David Schwartz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 2) Zeroing memory that doesn't need to be zeroed has a performance cost.

This particular argument doesn't actually apply here.  We wouldn't
have to zeroize any memory, we just wouldn't feed those bytes that are
not known to have been initialized into RAND_add().  The cost of
RAND_add() is a lot higher than that of memset(), so we'd even gain
some performance.  But we'd lose the randomness that is available when
the bytes not currently known to have been initialized have in fact
been previously initialized in a way not known by an attacker.
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