Re: Why does reading from /dev/urandom deplete entropy so much?

Jeff Garzik
2007-12-08T18:32:18Z

Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 11:33:57AM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
>>> Huh? What's the concern? All you are submitting is a list of
>>> hardware devices in your system. That's hardly anything sensitive....
>> We actually had a very vocal minority about all of that which ended up
>> putting us in the unfortunate position of generating a random UUID instead
>> of using a hardware UUID from hal :-/
>
> Tinfoil hat responses indeed! Ok, if those folks are really that
> crazy, my suggestion then would be to do a "ifconfig -a > /dev/random"

heh, along those lines you could also do

dmesg > /dev/random

<grin>

dmesg often has machine-unique identifiers of all sorts (including the
MAC address, if you have an ethernet driver loaded)

Jeff