GETENTROPY(3)

NAME
getentropy - generate uniform random seeds from system entropy for cryptography

LIBRARY
libc

SYNOPSIS
#include <unistd.h>
int
getentropy(void *buf, size_t buflen);
#include <limits.h>

#define GETENTROPY_MAX 256

DESCRIPTION
The getentropy function fills buf with exactly buflen independent uniform random bytes derived from the system's entropy pool.

The output of getentropy is meant to be unpredictable to an adversary and fit for use in cryptography. See CAVEATS below.

getentropy is meant for seeding random number generators, not for direct use by applications; most applications should use arc4random(3).

buflen must be at most 256.

RETURN VALUES

ERRORS
getentropy will succeed unless:

[EFAULT]
    The buf argument points to an invalid memory address.

[EINVAL]
    More than 256 bytes were requested.

CAVEATS
Security can only be guaranteed relative to whatever unpredictable physical processes or secret seed material are available to the system; see entropy(7).

On systems which have no hardware random number generator and which have not had secret seed material loaded, NetBSD makes a reasonable effort to incorporate samples from various physical processes available to it that might be unpredictable from random jitter in timing.

However, the getentropy interface alone can make no security guarantees without a physical system configuration that includes random number generation hardware or secret seed material from such hardware on another machine.

NetBSD attempts to reseed the system entropy pool when it has detected the system has been cloned as a guest in a virtual machine, so that subsequent calls to getentropy in the clones yield independent outputs. However, this relies on the virtual machine host to notify the guest, e.g. through the acpivmgenid(4) device, and even so there is an unavoidable small window of time between when the virtual machine is actually cloned and when the system is reseeded during which getentropy may yield identical outputs in the clones.

SEE ALSO
arc4random(3), rnd(4), entropy(7)

STANDARDS
The getentropy function conforms to p1003.1-2024.

HISTORY
The getentropy function first appeared in OpenBSD 5.6, then in FreeBSD 12.0, and in NetBSD 10.0.