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A comment on Random Number Generator Recommendations for Applications. Parent comment

Re:Random Number Generator Recommendations for Applications by cbsmith on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @06:01PM (#36144958)
But /dev/urandom will provide you with random numbers even if initialization has not completed, whereas /dev/random will not.
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Re:Random Number Generator Recommendations for Applications by tptacek on Thursday June 01, 2023 @02:09PM (#36155026)
It's best to think of this as an OS/distro detail; if you can reasonably expect /dev/urandom to give you insecure bits, your distro has a vulnerability.

That said: today you'd just use some variant of getrandom.

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Re:Random Number Generator Recommendations for Applications by cbsmith on Friday June 02, 2023 @03:34AM (#36162207)
> It's best to think of this as an OS/distro detail; if you can reasonably expect /dev/urandom to give you insecure bits, your distro has a vulnerability.

Isn't that more a function of hardware than software? The hardware random number generators on modern CPUs pretty much eliminate the need to worry about entropy...

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Re:Random Number Generator Recommendations for Applications by tptacek on Friday June 02, 2023 @10:42AM (#36165753)
No, this has nothing at all to do with hardware; the state of play is the same on machines that don't have instructions like RDRAND.
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Re:Random Number Generator Recommendations for Applications by cbsmith on Friday June 02, 2023 @02:20PM (#36168846)
I think I still don't understand. Can you explain why it is not a hypothetical problem on a deterministic virtual machine?
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