/dev/random Extremely Slow?

Question

Some background info: I was looking to run a script on a Red Hat server to read some data from /dev/random and use the Perl unpack() command to convert it to a hex string fo

Answer 1

use /dev/urandom, its cryptographically secure.

good read: http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/

"If you are unsure about whether you should use /dev/random or /dev/urandom, then probably you want to use the latter."

When in doubt in early boot, wether you have enough entropy gathered. use the system call getrandom() instead. [1] (from Linux kernel >= 3.17) Its best of both worlds,

• it blocks until (only once!) enough entropy is gathered,
• after that it will never block again.

[1] git kernel commit