[Nix-dev] Why is rngd running by default?

[Florian Friesdorf]

Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> writes:
> On 11/29/2012 02:00 AM, Mathijs Kwik wrote:
>> While at the subject of random number generation, I would like to plug 
>> the "frandom" package (+kernel module), , as it has been very useful 
>> to me. It is available in NixOS through the use of 
>> services.frandom.enable = true.
>>
>> It uses the kernel random device but provides an extremely fast 
>> /dev/frandom to use from userspace (20x speedup compared to 
>> /dev/urandom on my system). This makes it the perfect source for 
>> filling up disks before putting some full-disk-encryption on top of.
>
> Something I've never understood about this technique... Why not just 
> zero out the encrypted block device? Won't that make the underlying 
> device look effectively random?

Same here. My last two disks I "randomized" by zeroing out the encrypted
device.

-- 
Florian Friesdorf <flo at chaoflow.net>
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