Re: Getting randomic integers

[Rob Kendrick <rjek@...>]

On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:55:56 +0000
startx <startx@plentyfact.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:39:35 +0000
> Rob Kendrick <rjek@rjek.com> wrote:
> 
> > I seem to recall that even /dev/random under OS X can be unsafe to
> > use.  So much so that the man page even suggests that you feed it
> > entropy before reading from it.
> > 
> > (A daemon is responsible for feeding entropy to it normally, but
> > there's no easy way of knowing if that daemon is still running.)
> 
> i assume by "unsafe" you mean "unreliable", meaning that if there is
> not enought entropy it will block? thats the nature of /dev/random ,
> if you want non-blocking entropy /dev/urandom is what you need.

No, it won't block.  It's PRNG that is occasionally reseeded by people
writing to it.

B.