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benjaminjackman | 4 years ago

Genuinely curious what the use case(s) of reading from uninitialized are. Performance?

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Kalium|4 years ago

It was used as a source of randomness. Someone blindly fixing a "bug" as reported by a linter famously resulted in a major vulnerability in Debian: https://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571

scatters|4 years ago

This is incorrect.

If they had simply removed the offending line (or, indeed, set a preprocessor flag that was provided explicitly for that purpose) it would have been fine. The problem was that they also removed a similar looking line that was the path providing actual randomness.