Sept. 27, 2012
11:09 p.m.
Hey guys, I'm interested to know why generating cryptographically secure random numbers takes so long, particularly in my case. I have two Java classes that are generating a million random numbers. One is generating random numbers regularly while the other is using SecureRandom to generate the numbers. The SecureRandom method is taking almost double the time and I realised that it's because the method reads from /dev/urandom (not sure which) and obtains its random numbers from the entropy pool there. I wanted to know where I can read about the exact mechanism used to generate the cryptographically secure random numbers through SecureRandom and if there is any way to make it faster. -- Mihir Pandya