Re: Getting randomic integers

[Rob Kendrick <rjek@...>]

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:02:13 +0100
Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:

> > I'll agree that the chance of anybody successfully exploiting
> > /dev/urandom's lack-of-randomness are so close to nil as not to be
> > worth worrying about, but when dealing with cryptography one always
> > equates 'theoretically possible' to 'danger, Will Robinson!'.  
> 
> IIRC, there have been issues due to insufficient seeding, but they
> also affected /dev/random.

However, under Linux, /dev/random will only allow you to read up to the
number of bits that have gone in, so you can't really "underseed" it.
Unlike /dev/urandom, which only occationally gets reseeded
from /dev/random.

B.