urandom is too slow

From: Lasse Kärkkäinen
Date: Tue Oct 30 2012 - 10:55:16 EST


Apparently there has been little or no development on urandom even though the device is in widespread use for disk shredding and such use. The device emits data at rather slow rate of 19 MB/s even on modern hardware where other software-based PRNGs could do far better. An even better option seems to be utilizing AES for encrypting zeroes, using a random key, allowing for rates up to 500 MB/s with hardware that has AES-NI instructions.

Why is urandom so slow and why isn't AES hardware acceleration utilized?

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