Other Operating Systems
/dev/random
and /dev/urandom
are also available on Solaris, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Tru64 UNIX 5.1B, AIX 5.2, and HP-UX 11i v2. As with FreeBSD, AIX implements its own Yarrow-based design, however AIX uses considerably fewer entropy sources than the standard /dev/random
implementation and stops refilling the pool when it thinks it contains enough entropy.
In Windows NT, similar functionality is delivered by ksecdd.sys
, but reading the special file \Device\KsecDD
does not work as in UNIX. The documented methods to generate cryptographically random bytes are CryptGenRandom and RtlGenRandom.
While DOS doesn't naturally provide such functionality there is an open source third-party driver called Noise.sys which functions similarly in that it creates two devices, RANDOM$
and URANDOM$
, which are also accessible as /DEV/RANDOM$
and /DEV/URANDOM$
, that programs can access for random data.
Read more about this topic: /dev/random
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