How to deal with a slow SecureRandom generator?

Question

If you want a cryptographically strong random numbers in Java, you use SecureRandom. Unfortunately, SecureRandom can be very slow. If it uses

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with calls to SecureRandom blocking for about 25 seconds at a time on a headless Debian server. I installed the haveged daemon to ensure /dev/random is kept topped up, on headless servers you need something like this to generate the required entropy. My calls to SecureRandom now perhaps take milliseconds.