Increasing the entropy in virtual machines
Access to high-quality random numbers is important for the proper functioning of an operating system, in particular for its security related
components and applications. In case the rate by which /dev/random
provides random numbers within a VM is not sufficient, users can install
the rngd
service to generate random numbers from the underlying processor's Digital Random Number Generator (DRNG):
This will increase the rate at which random numbers are available from /dev/random
, but avoid the lower-quality pseudo-random numbers from
/dev/urandom
.
At the moment, the CERN cloud service does not configure the export of random numbers from the host to the guests (as implemented by the
virtio_rng
driver, for instance).