Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2015 01:26:35 -0700 From: Yuri <yuri@rawbw.com> To: Freebsd hackers list <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Does /dev/random in virtual guests provide good random data? Message-ID: <55A3763B.7010303@rawbw.com> In-Reply-To: <CCCC361E-70E1-4BA4-9765-65653F40DBC7@kientzle.com> References: <55A2FB68.3070006@rawbw.com> <CCCC361E-70E1-4BA4-9765-65653F40DBC7@kientzle.com>
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On 07/12/2015 18:14, Tim Kientzle wrote: > http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/ > > In particular, it has this interesting comment: > > FreeBSD does the right thing: they don't have the distinction There are two approaches in random stream generation. One is to have the sufficient random seed, and keep generating the following pseudo-random numbers only from this seed. The second approach is to also continuously feed the stream from some external source of entropy. The fact that the long running linux VM still blocks on /dev/random indicates that linux tries to collect more entropy on the go, following the latter approach (intuitively I would also agree this is better for randomness). So it isn't clear why FreeBSD random stream would be of the same quality, if it doesn't collect entropy on the go. Because both Linux and BSD have exactly the same entropy sources in VM. Yuri
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