Kernel Randomness Pool

  Computers are (generally) deterministic devices making it very hard to produce real random numbers. The PRNGs we use in OpenBSD do not generate random numbers themselves. Rather, they expand the randomness they are given as input. Fortunately, a multi-user operating system has many external events from which it can derive some randomness. In OpenBSD the kernel collects measurements from various devices such as the inter-keypress timing from terminals, the arrival time of network packets, and the finishing time of disk requests. The randomness from these sources is mixed into the kernel's entropy pool. When a userland program requests random data from the kernel, an MD5 hash is calculated over the whole entropy pool, ``folded'' in half by XOR-ing the upper and lower word of the MD5 output, and returned. The user can choose the quality of the generated random numbers by reading output from the different /dev/?random devices.