Re: /dev/random blocks forever on 2.2.12 and 2.2.16

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

   Date: 	Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:20:41 +0200
   From: Oscar Roozen <[e-mail]>

   On Mon, Aug 07, 2000 at 07:41:37PM +0000, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
   > >Yes, I can put a monkey behind the keyboard, but if somebody knows a 
   > >better solution, please don't be shy. ;)
   > Use /dev/urandom

   You mean I do "ln -sf /dev/urandom /dev/random" ?  Nah... ;)

   Several people sent me a private email sugesting to use urandom instead,
   but it's not what I use, it's about what all software on the machine uses.
   Should I patch SSH? Should I patch SSL? Or are they using urandom anyway?

My recommendation has always been that applications use /dev/random for
long-term public key generation, and to seed a pseudo-RNG for session
keys.  The reasoning behind this is that true, high-quality random
numbers is a very precious resource (even with a real high, quality
random number generator, it is still a limited resource), and so it's
better to periodically get randomness from /dev/random, and then use
that as seeds for a cryptographically secure, pseudo-random number
generator.

						- Ted