TECH Signal 276
When random.bytes() runs but doesn't work
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This is a concrete example of how poor commit hygiene and working around build errors in security-critical code can silently downgrade a system's entropy source. Engineers working on embedded or cryptographic systems should verify that hardware RNG paths remain active after configuration changes, since the device still compiled and ran despite the RNG being effectively neutered.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
The developer introduced a duplicate definition of pyb_rng_get_obj in a custom rng.c file, which is invalid in C and produced a compiler error.
Rather than resolve the duplicate symbol, the developer set MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG to 0, which excluded the entire hardware RNG module and incidentally eliminated the conflicting definition.
The offending commits had near-zero comment-to-code ratios—one message was just 'runs' across 1534 lines, another was 'x' across roughly 1000 lines—making the risky changes difficult to audit.
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