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Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

/dev/urandom is usually pseudo random, so as an initialization for SHA1PRNG random number generator it is not good enough. It seems that the suggested fix is not good enough; you need a real source of entropy - which is /dev/random.

The problem with /dev/random is that sometimes there is not enough system entropy (depending on the available hardware sources), so reading from it can block;

On smartphones they might use the radio signals as a source of entropy, get some data from the radio then MD5 the stuff; couldn't they do just that ?

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/dev/urandom and /dev/random follow the same bit generation routine except that /dev/random blocks when the estimated entropy in the input pool falls too low.

The SoCs on phones often have HWRNG support, they just don't always use it, or someone forgets to actually seed their entropy pool with it because they assumed some other bit of code would, which seems to be what happened here.

You mean, take noise that can be readily sampled, by the guys in the black van down the road (or more likely, the guy in the dorm-room next to you) -- and used to reconstruct your random seed?

I'm certainly no radio|crypto expert - but I don't think the "standard" radios on a smart phone are good sources of entropy -- I'm not sure how much raw signal you can actually get out of them (like you can't(?) sample radio noise with your ethernet card, just because it works like a radio).

An AM/FM radio might work (but might still not be a very good idea). There's been some projects using noise from the sound cards in pcs (the idea being sampling electrical noise from the system, not ambient noise, or "actual" sound).

/dev/urandom is usually pseudo random, so as an initialization for SHA1PRNG random number generator it is not good enough.

OpenSSL on most Unix-alike platforms has been seeding its default CSPRNG (which uses SHA-1 internally unless you've built OpenSSL without SHA-1 support) from /dev/urandom for over a decade. I don't understand why has everyone suddenly started framing /dev/urandom as a gigantic crypto bogeyman to be avoided at all costs. It just isn't so.

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