3 ms·
Probably because it will be slow and deplete the entropy pool. Statistical sampling doesn't require cryptographically-secure random number generation.
by colanderman 12y ago
Probably because it will be slow and deplete the entropy pool. Statistical sampling doesn't require cryptographically-secure random number generation.
- lomnakkus 12y ago"deplete the entropy pool" isn't really a meaningful phrase given the way the Linux /dev/{random,urandom} work. AFAIK /dev/random and /dev/urandom use the same CSPRNG (different instances) which is periodically reseeded with entropy gathered from the system (hw, interrupt timings, etc.), the only difference being that the /dev/random device blocks if an entropy estimator says that there's "too little entropy". It's not that /dev/random has been "depleted" (which is meaningless given how a CSPRNG works), it's just that some entropy estimation code thinks that it might not be a source of perfect entropy/randomness at a particular time. (This practice is pretty questionable, hence the proposed new syscall.)
- AlyssaRowan 12y agoThis. It'd just be silly to use a slow CSPRNG for that. With this, entropy pool depletion is not really that much of a concern; "urandom reads" from getrandom(2) will have at least one good seed.