Security and harddisk crubbing in Linux

[Steven Hanley]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2001 at 04:40:50PM +1000, Sam Couter wrote:
> Drake Diedrich <dld at coyote.com.au> wrote:
> >    /dev/urandom would take about a day to generate the necessary ~60G of
> > pseudorandom data per pass, but you could always write very short programs
> > (about three lines of C) to generate acceptable patterns instead and cut
> > that to the hard drive writing speed (about an hour/pass).
> 
> Wiggle yer mouse for a while. That should generate a fair bit of
> entropy.

entropy generation has nothing to do with the urandom device.

the /dev/random device uses the entropy pool for giving the most random sort
of data available. the /dev/urandom device is seeded on system startup and
then the random data coming out of it is generated algortihmically, however it
sis a somewhat more indepth way of generating data than necessary for this I
would suppose.

        See You
            Steve

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