NETS1035

RNG Links

Resources used or mentioned in this lesson:

• Wikipedia page on RNG with an excellent table of algorithms and where they are used
• /dev/random /dev/urandom reference info
• ent entropy/random number quality assessor
• the much briefer but still excellent Arch Linux wiki page on random number sources
• rng-tools reference info
• haveged entropy booster
• dieharder rng test suite
• FIPS140-2 NIST/CSE Security Standard
• Random number source for python

• How do you know if an RNG is working

• Rolling your own RNG
• Ultimate swiss army knife

Sample commands from the slides

CLI RNG invocation

echo $RANDOM
rand
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=1 of=/dev/null
openssl rand 1048576|dd of=/dev/null
hpenc -r -b 10M -c 100 |dd bs=10M of=/dev/null

ent examples

man ent

man ent | ent

man ent | ent -c

man ent | caesar 3 

man ent |
 caesar 3 |
 ent -c |
 awk '/^[0-9]/{print $2,$3}' |
 sort -nk 2 |
 tail 5

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=1 | ent

rngtest

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=1 | rngtest

openssl for rng

openssl speed rand
openssl rand 1048576 | dd of=/dev/null
openssl rand 1048576 | ent
openssl rand 1048576 | rngtest
openssl rand 1048576 | dieharder -a