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Obligatory "How To Safely Generate A Random Number" link[1] that I always wind up posting in threads like these. There's also the getrandom syscall[2] which uses the /dev/urandom pool.

[1] http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-random...

[2] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/getrandom.2.html

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Why are the man pages not so clear?

I'm not sure. I think part of the problem is that Linux still uses entropy estimation. This is also one of the issues I have with the proposed replacement[1][2] for Linux's current CSPRNG implementation since it still retains entropy estimations.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/684568/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561340 (HN thread for [1])

Btw Linux / Fortuna

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.1/1964.html

> There's also the getrandom syscall[2] which uses the /dev/urandom pool.

Sadly they just had to include GRND_RANDOM then compound that with GRND_NONBLOCK.

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