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From: daw@mozart.cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner)
Newsgroups: isaac.lists.linux-kernel
Subject: Re: [PATCH] (0/4) Entropy accounting fixes
Date: 22 Aug 2002 03:25:26 GMT
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Linus Torvalds  wrote:
>On the other hand, if you are _too_ anal you won't consider _anything_ 
>"truly random", and /dev/random becomes practically useless on things that 
>don't have special randomness hardware.

Well, /dev/random never was the right interface for most applications, and
this is arguably the real source of the problem.  For most applications,
what you want is something like /dev/urandom (possibly a version that
doesn't deplete all the true randomness available for /dev/random).  Very
few applications need true randomness; for most, cryptographic-quality
pseudorandomness should suffice.

1 bit of true randomness a minute should be more than sufficient for most
real applications.  (That means you can catastrophically reseed with 128
bits once every two hours, which sounds good to me.)
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