Entropy (computing) - OpenBSD Kernel

OpenBSD Kernel

OpenBSD has integrated cryptography as one of it's main goals and has always worked on increasing it's entropy for encryption but also for randomising many parts of the OS, including various internal operations of it's kernel. Around 2011, two of the random devices were dropped and linked into a single source as it could produce 100s of megabytes per second of high quality random data on an average system. This made depletion of random data by userland programs impossible on OpenBSD once enough entropy has initially been gathered. This is due to OpenBSD utilising an arc4random function to maximise the efficiency or minimise the wastage of entropy that the system has gathered.