True random numbers in Sol10 Post: 302978154

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Operating Systems Solaris True random numbers in Sol10 Post 302978154 by jlliagre on Tuesday 26th of July 2016 06:10:38 PM

07-26-2016

Registered User

You are right, the manual pages are indeed similar. The point here is the recommendation to avoid /dev/random and /dev/urandom might be valid when using a cryptographic pseudo random number generator but not that much in the OP case, which is specifically about the UltraSPARC T2 and newer high-performance internal hardware random number generator. The latter bases its entropy on physical measurements, i.e. not purely software generated sequences so shouldn't suffer from rapid entropy exhaustion like its software counterpart.
See this last paragraph in Solaris random(7d) manual:

Quote:

/dev/random collects entropy from providers that are registered with the kernel-level cryptographic framework and implement random number generation routines. The cryptoadm(1M) utility allows an administrator to configure which providers will be used with /dev/random.

Other relevant manual pages are cryptoadm(1m) and n2rng(7d)

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LEARN ABOUT MOJAVE

random

RANDOM(4)						   BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual 						 RANDOM(4)

NAME

     random , urandom -- random data source devices.

SYNOPSIS

     pseudo-device random

DESCRIPTION

     The random device produces uniformly distributed random byte values of potentially high quality.

     To obtain random bytes, open /dev/random for reading and read from it.

     The same random data is also available from getentropy(2).  Using the getentropy(2) system call interface will provide resiliency to file
     descriptor exhaustion, chroot, or sandboxing which can make /dev/random unavailable.  Additionally, the arc4random(3) API provides a fast
     userspace random number generator built on the random data source and is preferred over directly accessing the system's random device.

     /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.

     The random device implements the Yarrow pseudo random number generator algorithm and maintains its entropy pool.  The kernel automatically
     seeds the algorithm with additional entropy during normal execution.

FILES

     /dev/random
     /dev/urandom

HISTORY

     A random device appeared in the Linux operating system.

Darwin								 September 6, 2001							    Darwin