The perils of security tools

Philipp Gühring pg at futureware.at
Wed May 28 04:34:53 EDT 2008


Hi,

> (it doesn't just "slow down a lot"). Since /dev/random use depletes
> the pool directly, it is imperative that wasteful reads of this
> pseudo-device be avoided at all costs. 

Yes. Still, some people are using fopen/fread to access /dev/random, which 
does pre-fetching on most implementations I saw, so using open/read is 
preferred for using /dev/random.

Implementations can be rather easily checked with strace.

Best regards,
Philipp Gühring

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