/dev/random question

[RW]

On Sun, 16 Sep 2007 15:21:38 +0200
Mel <fbsd.questions at rachie.is-a-geek.net> wrote:

> On Sunday 16 September 2007 03:01:26 RW wrote:
> 
> > Essentially what has happened is that /dev/random has been
> > abandoned in favour of a better /dev/urandom, and that seems to be
> > a bit high-handed to me.
> 
> Not high-handed. Logical. The difference between /dev/random
> and /dev/urandom was that /dev/random could block IO if it didn't
> have enough entropy and /dev/urandom guaranteed to not block. The
> underlying algorithm creating the random was at the discretion of the
> implementers.

AFAIK it's all at the discretion of the implementers, unless someone
can quote a standard.
 
> So what you had was a highway (urandom) and a road with
> traffic lights (random). The need for the traffic lights has been
> removed, so there is no logic in not calling it a highway. 

Wasn't the highway /dev/urandom?

> People
> travelling the random road, will simply account for the possibility a
> traffic light comes up, which never does.

That's a poor analogy  because they haven't improved /dev/random so it
doesn't block, they've taken a /dev/urandom implementation and renamed
it. In terms of your analogy they've blocked off the road, diverted
everyone onto the highway, and renamed it to main street.

Using Yarrow for /dev/random is not an intrinsically bad idea, but it
is controversial.