In Linux, sometimes you may need to generate some entropy.

Solutions

There are both hardware and software solutions:

• Hardware solutions: they can generate more entropy per second, but you need physical access
• Software solutions: they have less performance, but you just need root permissions (no physical access)

Hardware solutions

Typically it’s a USB device that generates and streams some random numbers.

One of such devices is TrueRNG (price is approx: 50$).

Software solutions

RNGD

This program feeds random data from hardware device to kernel.

rngd -r "/dev/urandom"

Here we have used rngd program (man 8 rngd for more details).

This daemon feeds data from a random number generator to the kernel’s random number entropy pool, after first checking the data to ensure that it is properly random.

Audio Entropy Daemon

This program feeds the /dev/random device with entropy-data read from an audio device.

The audio-data is not copied as is but first de-biased and analysed to determine how much bits of entropy is in it.

The official website of the program is here.