Re: Re: Still wondering about random numbers...

Allan Engelhardt <allane@cybaea.com> writes:

> On other motherboards, reading from /dev/random can stall
> indefinitely.  This is not a Good Thing.  /dev/urandom is fine, but
> not rally better than rand(3) or random(3).

Wrong; it's still a lot better, especially if you have a reasonable
amount of entropy coming in--/dev/urandom uses the same entropy pool
as /dev/random and generates its data using a cryptographically secure
hash function.  This is still a lot better (for crypto purposes) than
the simple LCGs used in the standard C library functions.

See the random(4) manpage on your Linux system for more details.

-Doug
--
Free Dmitry Sklyarov!
http://www.freesklyarov.org/

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