faster /dev/random

[Thomas Cameron]

On 08/22/2010 02:47 AM, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
>
> Thomas Cameron<thomas.cameron at camerontech.com>  writes:
>> I've always heard that you can get faster random numbers by generating a
>> lot of interrupts.  I usually do something like run
>> /etc/cron.daily/mlocate to generate a lot of disk activity.
>
> I noticed that things speed up quite a bit if I move the mouse in
> circles for 10 minutes.  The Linux kernel sure makes me work for my
> random numbers. ;-)
>
>> And, as I said earlier, depending on how random you want your numbers to
>> be, you might consider using /dev/urandom, which is a pseudo-random
>> number generator and is a lot faster than /dev/random.
>
> I'm a bit wary of urandom since it will cut down on the search space for
> my key.  If I need to wait a few days for my 28 keys to be crunched, I'd
> rather just wait.

It's a trade-off, I guess.  I don't do anything that is so security 
sensitive that I have to have that random a number.  For me, if I need 
random I can use the pseudo-random device and I know that it's "good 
enough."

What are you doing that is worth waiting a month for?  Or would you have 
to kill us if you told us?  ;-)