Speed and security of /dev/urandom

Andrey Chernov ache at freebsd.org
Fri Jul 18 20:37:30 UTC 2014


On 18.07.2014 3:41, Steven Chamberlain wrote:
> Is there a good reason arc4random_buf() can't take bytes directly from
> /dev/urandom or sysctl KERN_ARND?  Therefore no longer needing to seed
> first, periodically reseed, or use any stream cipher?

One of the reason I hear is that true random entropy bits can be quickly
exhausted if every userland program will drain them so much.

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