Comment 2 for bug 706011

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Daniel Silverstone (dsilvers) wrote :

The method described here thoroughly and completely misses the point of entropy.

urandom is not a source of entropy, and using it to seed random via rngtools is a dangerous activity to recommend; let alone to default to.

Better that the user follow the instructions and wiggle their mouse/keyboard if they have insufficient entropy. It's not like gpg doesn't tell the user what to do.

gpg shouldn't even suggest rng-tools, because the vast majority of people do not have a true hardware RNG which it can properly take advantage of.

If you want a more thorough understanding of why this method is bad, please learn about entropy and random numbers properly, and then read about the internal architecture of Linux's random/urandom pair.