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Actually for something cryptographic or sensitive in nature you would want to read from /dev/random. The "u" in urandom stands for unlimited, basically if the e
by MertsA 13y ago
Actually for something cryptographic or sensitive in nature you would want to read from /dev/random. The "u" in urandom stands for unlimited, basically if the entropy pool runs dry, reads from /dev/urandom will still return data but that data doesn't necessarily have a significant amount of entropy in it. Reads from /dev/random however will block and wait for more entropy if the entropy pool runs dry.
- tptacek 13y agoNo, this is an urban myth perpetuated by a broken man page. Cryptographic software should use urandom, not random.
- sillysaurus2 13y agotptacek has addressed this concern many times before: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=author:tptacek%20urandom#!/comment/forever/0/author:tptacek%20urandom https://hn.algolia.com/?q=author:tptacek%20urandom#!/comment... The summary is that it's a myth.