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0 pointsthrowaway204810y ago0 comments

"Draining" is a fantasy, statistics about it are manufactured by the kernel randomness subsystems. Are you concerned with your ssh keys "running out" too?

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raesene610y ago· 2 in thread

excuse my potential ignorance, but I thought that /dev/random was at risk of exhaustion in the general case, with /dev/urandom not being so...

e.g. http://www.onkarjoshi.com/blog/191/device-dev-random-vs-uran... or http://security.stackexchange.com/a/14293/37

cyphar10y ago

I got schooled about this a few days ago. Here's the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11485832. The tl;dr is that basically you should just use /dev/urandom unless you're in very weird circumstances. Entropy doesn't "run out" in that sense.

raesene610y ago

oh yes I agree /dev/urandom is the way to go, but the original comment said that the paper's suggestion that a container could exhaust the pool on /dev/random was false and that's what I was curious about. I thought it was possible to exhaust /dev/random...

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