need a lot of entropies - help me pls :)

[Joseph Oreste Bruni]

On May 6, 2007, at 6:11 AM, Janusz A. Urbanowicz wrote:

> On Sat, May 05, 2007 at 09:03:02PM +0200, Piotr Firlej wrote:
>> On 5/5/07, Philipp Gühring <pg at futureware.at> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>> Hi, thanks for reply,
>>
>>> Here you have a list of random number generators that are  
>>> available on the
>>> market:
>>> http://www.cacert.at/cgi-bin/rngresults
>>
>> Nice list, i have been trying to use /dev/urandom, even have compiled
>> gnupg with changes in configure file where i have changed all
>> /dev/random /dev/srandom to /dev/urandom, but that doesn't help at
>> all...
>>
>
> /dev/urandom is bad for your security
>

Not always.

Here is a portion of the man page from OS X:

      /dev/urandom is a compatibility nod to Linux. On Linux, /dev/ 
urandom will
      produce lower quality output if the entropy pool drains, while
      /dev/random will prefer to block and wait for additional  
entropy to be
      collected.  With Yarrow, this choice and distinction is not  
necessary,
      and the two devices behave identically. You may use either.


That said, it makes sense to know the system you're building on.


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