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by tptacek 1117 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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...

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.
I think I still don't understand. Can you explain why it is not a hypothetical problem on a deterministic virtual machine?