Manual Pages  — ARC4RANDOM

Use of these functions is encouraged for almost all random number consumption because the other interfaces are deficient in either quality, portability, standardization, or availability. These functions can be called in almost all coding environments, including pthreads(3) and chroot(2).

High quality 32-bit pseudo-random numbers are generated very quickly. On each call, a cryptographic pseudo-random number generator is used to generate a new result. One data pool is used for all consumers in a process, so that consumption under program flow can act as additional stirring. The subsystem is re-seeded from the kernel random number subsystem using getentropy(2) on a regular basis, and also upon fork(2).

The arc4random() function returns a single 32-bit value. The arc4random() function returns pseudo-random numbers in the range of 0 to 2³¹-1, and therefore has twice the range of rand(3) and random(3).

arc4random_buf() fills the region buf of length nbytes with random data.

arc4random_uniform() will return a single 32-bit value, uniformly distributed but less than upper_bound. This is recommended over constructions like "arc4random() % upper_bound" as it avoids "modulo bias" when the upper bound is not a power of two. In the worst case, this function may consume multiple iterations to ensure uniformity; see the source code to understand the problem and solution.