How to deal with a slow SecureRandom generator?

java performance security random entropy
David G picture David G · Sep 26, 2008 · Viewed 145.3k times · Source

If you want a cryptographically strong random numbers in Java, you use SecureRandom. Unfortunately, SecureRandom can be very slow. If it uses /dev/random on Linux, it can block waiting for sufficient entropy to build up. How do you avoid the performance penalty?

Has anyone used Uncommon Maths as a solution to this problem?

Can anybody confirm that this performance problem has been solved in JDK 6?

Answer

Thomas Leonard picture Thomas Leonard · Feb 24, 2010

You should be able to select the faster-but-slightly-less-secure /dev/urandom on Linux using:

-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/urandom

However, this doesn't work with Java 5 and later (Java Bug 6202721). The suggested work-around is to use:

-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom

(note the extra /./)

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