Re: Concurrent access to /dev/urandom

Jon Masters
2004-11-29T23:08:16Z

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 15:45:49 -0500, Bernard Normier <bernard@zeroc.com> wrote:

> I use /dev/urandom to generate UUIDs by reading 16 random bytes from
> /dev/urandom (very much like e2fsprogs' libuuid).

Why not use /dev/random for such data instead?

/dev/urandom suffers from a poor level of entropy if you keep reading
from it over and over again whereas the alternative can block until it
has more randomness available.

Cheers,

Jon.