Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 15:31:28 +0000 (GMT) From: The Deviant <deviant@pooh-corner.com> On Wed, 27 Nov 1996, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Subj sez it all.
Thank you.
- Igor.
Yes, as a matter of fact it is. /dev/random is based on an entropy pool taken from hardware interrupts and such, thus is a RNG, not a PRNG (thats right IPG, Linux uses hardware to get random numbers... imagine that!). /dev/urandom is, however, a PRNG... Only if you try to pull out more bits than you can get from /dev/random. Note that /dev/random on a single-user system doesn't generate bits fast enough to be practical for OTP generation (try od -tc1 /dev/random sometime; you'll get about 512 bytes if you haven't used it lately, then reads will block until enough unpredictable things happen ). Of course, you can add more randomness sources. How good a source would a radio or diode noise source connected to the parallel port's IRQ input be? It certainly sounds like it would be cheap enough.