David Wong

cryptologie.net

cryptography, security, and random thoughts

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity, research advisor at Archetype, and author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a cryptography architect of Mina at O(1) Labs, the security lead for Libra/Diem at Facebook, and a security engineer at the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. Welcome to my blog about cryptography, security, and other related topics.

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Generating randomness and you're too close to boot?

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If you want to generate good randomness, but are iffy about /dev/urandom because your machine has just booted, and you also don’t know how long you should wait before /dev/urandom has enough entropy, then maybe you should consider using getrandom (thanks rwg!). From the manpage:

By default, getrandom() draws entropy from the /dev/urandom pool.

If the pool has not yet been initialized, then the call blocks

Also it seems like the instruction RDRAND on certain Intel chips returns “true” random numbers. It’s also interesting to see that it was audited twice by Cryptography Research, which resulted in two papers, the recent one being in 2012 and done by Kocher et al: Analysis of Intel’s Ivy Bridge Digital Random Number Generator.

← back to all posts blog • 2016-07-31
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Generating randomness and you're too close to boot?
07-31 blog
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