Toshiba shows 2Mbps hardware RNG

David Wagner daw at cs.berkeley.edu
Wed Feb 13 16:49:39 EST 2008


Crawford Nathan-HMGT87 writes:
>One of the problems with the Linux random number generator
>is that it happens to be quite slow, especially if you need a lot of
>data.

/dev/urandom is blindingly fast.  For most applications, that's
all you need.

(Of course there are many Linux applications that use /dev/random
simply because they don't know any better, but that's a pretty weak
argument for a fast hardware RNG.)

A fast hardware RNG could be useful but I'm not convinced high
speed matters all that much for most applications.  Grab 128 bits
for a hardware RNG, feed it through AES-CTR to generate an unending
stream of pseudorandom bits -- that's good enough for most applications.

(Yes, I know there are exceptions where pseudorandomness is not
enough.  But even the exceptions rarely need true random numbers at
a rate of several Mbps.)

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