Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:44:10 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Roland Smith" <rsmith@xs4all.nl>, "Per olof Ljungmark" <peo@intersonic.se> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: /dev/random question Message-ID: <BMEDLGAENEKCJFGODFOCCEGHCAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20070913153630.GA9448@slackbox.xs4all.nl>
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/dev/urandom is a hack. In a perfect world, the /dev/random device would be able to return a string of random numbers as fast as you wanted, and there would not have been a need for /dev/urandom Since FreeBSD tries to be close to perfect ;-) it uses a better random driver that can produce random numbers as fast as you want them. The symlink is there only as a crutch for older UNIX code that was written when there was a difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom Ted > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Roland Smith > Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 8:37 AM > To: Per olof Ljungmark > Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: /dev/random question > > > On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 04:56:26PM +0200, Per olof Ljungmark wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Could someone on the list point me to a document that explains the > > functionality of /dev/random in FreeBSD in a little more depth > than the man > > page? In other OS's I've looked at random and urandom are > different, here > > it's a symlink (talking about RELENG-6 onwards). > > FreeBSD uses the yarrow algorithm, as mentioned in random(4). See > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarrow_algorithm > http://www.schneier.com/yarrow.html > > Roland > -- > R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ > [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] > pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725) >
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