ERernststraeumli·Feb 12, 2024Submission
Haveged being evaluated by AI models
1 points · Open discussionjirka-h
haveged
C2019–2024
jirka-h / haveged
haveged
Entropy daemon 
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
312GitHub stars
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What it is
Entropy daemon 
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-01-16 03:22:55 UTC to 2024-02-12 02:24:09 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
4 sources> When are we going to get a distributed peer to peer randomness service.
(assuming you mean computers returning random numbers, and your people with dice is an analogy)
The problem with that is how do you trust the source if you need “cryptographically secret” random numbers. One of the sources could poison the well with bad entropy and increase by a small but significant amount the chance of guessing your keys.
OK, so you could the data from many sources, but that would add latency so not an option where performance matters and even then if someone gains control of a significant portion of the distributed system (just by standing up lots of hosts) the issue persists.
You could also do a bunch of statistical tests, but again that is work that will harm performance and if you are going to that sort of effort anyway you could setup your ow
Read the rest
n random sources (a couple of active Linux boxes, on older Linux kernels running haveged, on newer ones the latter part isn't needed (https://github.com/jirka-h/haveged/issues/57)) and use those tests to make sure those sources are statically safe.
So such a service isn't really needed, and where it might be isn't likely to be trusted, so it could exist but as a play-thing not a serious service.
On my little home server, not a particularly up to date CPU etc, running 5.10, I can pull >3Gbit/sec from /dev/random. Heck, the Pi400 that is currently my router can hand out ~230Mbit/sec or entropy.
Is haveged still useful/relevant?
10 points · Open discussion> some cloud computing environments just don't get any other new entropy after boot
For environments like that, I think Haveged is the general approach these days. Latest dev code (revived project) is now here:
https://github.com/jirka-h/haveged
It's the (officially blessed, I think) continuation from the original Haveged:
http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/
In An Almost-Secret Algorithm Researchers Used to Break Thousands of RSA Keys