That link lines out the single most important technical detail:
> FreeBSD’s kernel crypto RNG doesn’t block regardless of whether you use /dev/random or urandom. Unless it hasn’t been seeded, in which case both block. This behavior, unlike Linux’s, makes sense. Linux should adopt it.
It boils down to a tricky and potentially misleading interface. Abstractions are leaky beasts, and if there are many ways to get apparently identical results, we will use the one that most closely aligns with our usual way of thinking.
Security is hard to get right. Cryptographic security depends on entropy, so getting sufficient entropy should be hard too. Right?
Maybe the default answer should be "yeah, right" instead.
> FreeBSD’s kernel crypto RNG doesn’t block regardless of whether you use /dev/random or urandom. Unless it hasn’t been seeded, in which case both block. This behavior, unlike Linux’s, makes sense. Linux should adopt it.
It boils down to a tricky and potentially misleading interface. Abstractions are leaky beasts, and if there are many ways to get apparently identical results, we will use the one that most closely aligns with our usual way of thinking.
Security is hard to get right. Cryptographic security depends on entropy, so getting sufficient entropy should be hard too. Right?
Maybe the default answer should be "yeah, right" instead.