High-quality random numbers are essential to the security of many algorithms and
protocols.
Computers are deterministic by nature and so cannot easily generate randomness. The lack of
sufficient randomness has caused cryptographic leaks in the past. This is of particular concern for
virtual machines which often lack direct connections to devices that could provide events with
random timing. With IBM z16, IBM z15®,
and
LinuxONE III, each processor has a true-random-number unit,
which can be accessed by Linux®, and which is used to feed
the kernel entropy pool and to seed pseudo-random-number generators [4].