Waiting for /dev/urandom to update…
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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urandom*
Fixed
Not that much of a fix. It's mostly down to pedantry on my behalf.
My understanding is that:
/dev/random is blocking unless sufficient entropy is available.
/dev/urandom is non-blocking and will supply output anyway.
So for security-critical stuff that might run in a low entropy state (such as during boot), you probably want to use /dev/random. But in 99% of the cases /dev/urandom is fine, and it won't halt your program.
How can they mention that there were 0.3% not treu random numbers generated and not explain how?!
Huh, neat.