The method described here thoroughly and completely misses the point of entropy.
urandom is not a source of entropy, and using it to seed random via rngtools is a dangerous activity to recommend; let alone to default to. Better that the user follow the instructions and wiggle their mouse/keyboard if they have insufficient entropy. It's not like gpg doesn't tell the user what to do. gpg shouldn't even suggest rng-tools, because the vast majority of people do not have a true hardware RNG which it can properly take advantage of. If you want a more thorough understanding of why this method is bad, please learn about entropy and random numbers properly, and then read about the internal architecture of Linux's random/urandom pair. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/706011 Title: gpg --key-gen doesn't have enough entropy and rng-tools install/start fails -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
