Linked Questions

If it's true you only need about 128 bits of entropy to fuel enough data forever, why is it that /dev/random is so slow? My system has uptime of 214 days! Is it really only gathering .000000001 bits ...

Lets say I want to create a cookie for a user. Would simply generating a 1024 bit string by using /dev/urandom, and checking if it already exists (looping until I get a unique one) suffice? Should I ...

When setting up a server, what configuration changes do I need to make sure that all of the software uses /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random? Some servers don't have much entropy in the entropy pool ...

As a hosting provider, I'd like to make the process of generating a certificate for a customer's domain as convenient as possible. I was pondering creating a webpage where anyone could: generate a ...

The RHEL5 manuals state that /dev/urandom will use the entropy pool until it's exhausted, and then it will resort to a fall-back pseudo-random algorithm, so that it will never block. But when ...

Modern Linux systems, especially headless virtuals, often have shallow /dev/random entropy pools, which can cause software to block or fail to run (e.g. Tripwire in FIPS mode) While many agree /dev/...

It seems (to a non-expert) that /dev/random is acclaimed to be useable as a source of pure random data. However, I am curious as to the analysis of the file /dev/random. /dev/random is a collection ...

I looked at the questions here and here. This then piqued my interest as I've recently been involved with looking into FIPS compliance, and in my vm environment /dev/urandom compliance testing ...

A lot of computer security depends on encryption: SSL connections, TCP packet sequencing, encrypted files, etc. These depend on random number generation to ensure that attackers can't guess the ...

I have access to genuine random numbers - random.org, for example. I have a number of processes using /dev/random and my value for /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail is 143, which is pretty low. ...