How good is SecRandomCopyBytes?

Question

I\'m principally interested in the implementation of SecRandomCopyBytes on iOS, if it differs from the OS X implementation. (I would presume that i

Answer 1

The iOS SDK clearly states that this function uses the output of /dev/random for retrieving the secure random data. As iOS is a ported version of OSX which itself is in it's core a Free-BSD.

If you seach for /dev/random and OSX you find several posts that there was (and my be is) a problem regarding the entropy collection in OSX:

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg00620.html

Therefore I would expect that /dev/random works not better than the one in OSX.