excessive usage of /dev/random?

[lists-gnupgdev at lina.inka.de]

Am Fri, 01 May 2015 20:46:11 +0200
schrieb Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org>:

> > is "way too fast" really an issue?  If we had excellent entropy, we
> > wouldn't care about it showing up speedily, right?
> 
> I consider this a bug in the kernel or maybe it is due to the use of
> RDRAND.  Might not be an issue with current kernels anymore, though.

I think this was only a problem with urandom. Unfortunatelly the new
random() syscall in Linux is not much safer to use (especially if
requesting more than 256bytes a time). I wish arc4randome from OpenBSD
would be more common place.

Gruss
Bernd

PS: http://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2014-arc4random/mgp00015.html