3 ms·

I'm not sure if its still that way but I know PGP used to do that on Windows 95/98. You would have to move your mouse around in a window until it generated enou

by gaadd33 13y ago

I'm not sure if its still that way but I know PGP used to do that on Windows 95/98. You would have to move your mouse around in a window until it generated enough entropy to generate your key. I'm pretty sure I've seen it in either ssh keygen or openssl stuff also but that might have been in a virtual machine/jail with a poor or missing /dev/random. Also I believe that is where /dev/random might get some of its information from, but I'm not too sure.

andrewflnr 13y ago
I'm pretty much 100% sure that's how /dev/random works. Not only have I heard that multiple times, but once when I was installing arch linux or something, my computer ran out of random bits and told me I had to wait for it to get some more from the hardware. I don't think it actually asked me to play with the keyboard, but IIRC that's what it took. Letting it just sit there didn't seem to do the trick.