Timeline for Feeding /dev/random entropy pool?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 2, 2015 at 5:53 | comment | added | Freedo | Most useful answer here, i don't know 4 years ago but today is very easy to deplete the kernel pool on servers especially if you want to do some kind of prediction resistance. So very useful. I did some tests with Haveged and is very good, it can raise my entropy to 0 from 1300 em less than 1 sec. Looking further to increase this even more | |
| Jun 15, 2015 at 17:49 | comment | added | OtherDevOpsGene | @ViktorDahl /dev/random blocks unless it has enough entropy to avoid relying solely on the PRNG. It really just uses the PRNG as a mixing function. | |
| Jun 14, 2015 at 18:44 | comment | added | Viktor Dahl | @CoverosGene /dev/urandom and /dev/random use the same PRNG. | |
| Oct 17, 2014 at 21:53 | comment | added | OtherDevOpsGene | /dev/urandom doesn't get depleted, but the entropy from /dev/random may. Generating a lot of crypto keys or making a lot of SSL connections both can chew up a lot of entropy from /dev/random. Haveged at least adds some more entropy to /dev/random, so that you don't have to rely on the PRNG in /dev/urandom. | |
| Apr 30, 2012 at 9:22 | comment | added | Yoav Aner | +1 for haveged. From personal experience primarily with virtual servers, which do not have a keyboard or mouse attached, and can't have a microphone easily connected either, haveged really makes sure things are running smoothly. How strong its PRNG is, it's hard for me to say, but it sounds reasonably safe (particularly compared to just relying on urandom) | |
| Jul 15, 2011 at 6:38 | comment | added | tkit | first of all, I tested all this (monitoring entropy while using different methods, so when the entropy drops down rapidly to some very low values - it means it got depleted). second, I read a lot about it all at the time of asking the question - kernel handled all this differently some time ago. third - these are your words "/dev/random has some issues: it blocks, it depletes the entropy pool" :)) | |
| Jul 15, 2011 at 5:57 | comment | added | D.W. | @pootzko, I don't believe it. I suspect you are misinterpreting what you are seeing. /dev/urandom never gets depleted. | |
| Jul 14, 2011 at 12:58 | comment | added | tkit | @D.W. it does not, they did someyhing with the (Linux) kernel so it's not working any more as it used to (gets depleted very fast)... | |
| Jan 17, 2011 at 5:53 | comment | added | D.W. | Those are unnecessary. The kernel already feeds /dev/random and /dev/urandom with sufficient entropy for these purposes. | |
| Dec 11, 2010 at 10:10 | history | answered | krempita | CC BY-SA 2.5 |