KCAPI-RNG(1)

💖 KCAPI-RNG 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the General Commands Manual section, this is kcapi-rng, and she is that girl 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

kcapi-rng — Kernel Crypto API Random Number Gatherer 👑

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

kcapi-rng [OPTION]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So the kcapi-rng app is literally your little tool to pull random numbers out of the Linux kernel crypto API, straight from the command line 💅

It's giving "reading /dev/hwrand" energy, except — and this is the important part — the random number generators it uses are fully deterministic, meaning they are DRNGs fr fr.

Any potential seed data? You can hand it over via STDIN 🫶 Some of the DRNGs need seeding because they don't seed themselves. So kcapi-rng makes sure the DRNGs get seeded by pulling that seed data from the getrandom system call (or /dev/urandom if getrandom isn't available, ngl).

How much seed data? That's defined by the DRNG itself, and you can go review it in /proc/crypto 👀

And here's the cute part: the seed you provide via STDIN gets added to the internally-generated seed. Then the generated random numbers go out to STDOUT. periodt ✨

The following options are supported when invoking kcapi-rng:

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💜 OPTIONS 💜

• -b, --bytes BYTES — generate BYTES number of random bytes 🌈
• -n, --name NAME — the NAME argument says which random number generator implementation you wanna use 💫 The allowed random number generators are defined by the Linux kernel, and you can check which ciphers are currently registered at /proc/crypto. > heads up bestie: the content of that file can change when new ciphers get registered, so don't treat it as set in stone 💀 The NAME argument is given directly to the Linux kernel crypto API. The cipher you pick must be of type rng, as marked in /proc/crypto. If you don't use this option, the cipher stdrng is used as the default 🎀
• --hex — the generated random numbers get printed out in hexadecimal notation instead of as a binary string 🔥
• -v, --verbose — enables a verbose operation of kcapi-rng. Use this option multiple times to increase the verbosity 📈
• -q, --quiet — prevents the generation of any log output 🤫
• -h, --help — displays the help text 🫶
• --version — displays the version number of the kcapi-rng application ⭐

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

kcapi-enc(1) kcapi-dgst(1) kcapi-hasher(1)

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🧚 this was KCAPI-RNG(1) from the General Commands Manual, dated 2017-08-14, mwah 💖 no cap, go generate some bytes 💅✨