RANDOM(4) Linux Programmer's Manual RANDOM(4) NAME random, urandom - kernel random number source devices DESCRIPTION The character special files /dev/random and /dev/urandom (present since Linux 1.3.30) provide an interface to the kernel's random number generator. File /dev/random has major device number 1 and minor device number 8. File /dev/urandom has major device number 1 and minor device number 9. The random number generator gathers environmental noise from device drivers and other sources into an entropy pool. The generator also keeps an estimate of the number of bit of the noise in the entropy pool. From this entropy pool random numbers are created. When read, the /dev/random device will only return random bytes within the estimated number of bits of noise in the entropy pool. /dev/random should be suitable for uses that need very high quality randomness such as one-time pad or key generation. When the entropy pool is empty, reads to /dev/random will block until additional environ- mental noise is gathered. When read, /dev/urandom device will return as many bytes as are requested. As a result, if there is not sufficient entropy in the entropy pool, the returned values are theo- retically vulnerable to a cryptographic attack on the algorithms used by the driver. Knowledge of how to do this is not available in the current non-classified liter- ature, but it is theoretically possible that such an attack may exist. If this is a concern in your applica- tion, use /dev/random instead. CONFIGURING If your system does not have /dev/random and /dev/urandom created already, they can be created with the following commands: mknod -m 644 /dev/random c 1 8 mknod -m 644 /dev/urandom c 1 9 chown root:root /dev/random /dev/urandom When a Linux system starts up without much operator inter- action, the entropy pool may be in a fairly predictable state. This reduces the actual amount of noise in the entropy pool below the estimate. In order to counteract this effect, it helps to carry entropy pool information across shut-downs and start-ups. To do this, add the fol- lowing lines to an appropriate script which is run during the Linux system start-up sequence: echo "Initializing kernel random number generator..." # Initialize kernel random number generator with random seed # from last shut-down (or start-up) to this start-up. Load and # then save 512 bytes, which is the size of the entropy pool. if [ -f /var/random-seed ]; then cat /var/random-seed >/dev/urandom fi dd if=/dev/urandom of=/var/random-seed count=1 Also, add the following lines in an appropriate script which is run during the Linux system shutdown: # Carry a random seed from shut-down to start-up for the random # number generator. Save 512 bytes, which is the size of the # random number generator's entropy pool. echo "Saving random seed..." dd if=/dev/urandom of=/var/random-seed count=1 FILES /dev/random /dev/urandom AUTHOR The kernel's random number generator was written by Theodore Ts'o (tytso@athena.mit.edu). The owner of this domain is Stefan Heumader-Rainer (perl -e 'print reverse qw(t a . r e d a m u e h @ n a f e t s)'). SEE ALSO /dev/urandom.at Data Privacy Statement mknod (1) RFC 1750, "Randomness Recommendations for Security" Linux August 1, 1997 1