No, they can&#x27;t. That&#x27;s not how crypto DRBGs work. If you could do that, you&#x27;d have demonstrated a flaw in the entire &#x2F;dev&#x2F;random apparatus, not a reason not to use urandom.<p>Think of a CSPRNG almost exactly the way you would a stream cipher --- that&#x27;s more or less all a CSPRNG is. Imagine you&#x27;d intercepted the ciphertext of a stream cipher and that you knew the first 1024 plaintext bytes, because of a file header or because it contained a message you sent, or something like that. Could you XOR out the known plaintext, recover the first 1024 bytes of keystream, and use it to predict the next 1024 bytes of keystream? If so, you&#x27;d have demolished the whole stream cipher. Proceed immediately to your nearest crypto conference; you&#x27;ll be famous.<p>Modern CSPRNGs, and Linux&#x27;s, work on the same principle. They use the same mechanisms as a stream cipher (you can even turn a DRBG into a stream cipher). The only real difference is that you select keys for a stream cipher, and you use a feed of entropy as the key&#x2F;rekey for a CSPRNG.<p>It&#x27;s facts like this that make the Linux man page so maddening, with its weird reference to attacks &quot;not in the unclassified literature&quot;.