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Concept
/dev/random
Summary
In Unix-like operating systems, and are s that serve as cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators. They allow access to environmental noise collected from device drivers and other sources. typically blocked if there was less entropy available than requested; more recently (see below for the differences between operating systems) it usually blocks at startup until sufficient entropy has been gathered, then unblocks permanently. The device typically was never a blocking device, even if the pseudorandom number generator seed was not fully initialized with entropy since boot. Not all operating systems implement the same methods for and .
Random number generation in kernel space was implemented for the first time for Linux in 1994 by Theodore Ts'o.
The implementation used secure hashes rather than ciphers, to avoid cryptography export restrictions that were in place when the generator was originally designed. The implementation was also designed with the assumption that any given hash or cipher might eventually be found to be weak, and so the design is durable in the face of any such weaknesses. Fast recovery from pool compromise is not considered a requirement, because the requirements for pool compromise are sufficient for much easier and more direct attacks on unrelated parts of the operating system.
In Ts'o's implementation, the generator keeps an estimate of the number of bits of noise in the entropy pool. From this entropy pool random numbers are created. When read, the device will only return random bytes within the estimated number of bits of noise in the entropy pool. When the entropy pool is empty, reads from will block until additional environmental noise is gathered. The intent is to serve as a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator, delivering output with entropy as large as possible. This is suggested by the authors for use in generating cryptographic keys for high-value or long-term protection.
A counterpart to is ("unlimited"/non-blocking random source) which reuses the internal pool to produce more pseudo-random bits.
Official source
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