Vanitygen has the option for a file to contain random numbers as an alternative to the built-in random number generator.
What is the correct way to generate this file on Windows, OSX? (and Linux)
What is the range of each number (upper and lower bound)?
What is the correct format of the file (CRLF, LF only)?
Do not use such a file from any (public) source!
Generate it yourself always, preferable off-line.
On linux:
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=1 2> /dev/null 1> seed.bin
This file can be read by vanitygen if you execute it with the -s option, like so:
$ ./vanitygen64 -v -s ./seed.bin 1XYZ1
Read 1024 bytes from RNG seed file
Prefix difficulty: 264104224 1XYZ1
...
It uses RAND_load_file function from OpenSSL, which accepts any binary input - random bytes. Under Linux and OSX the /dev/random file can be used, I don't know equivalent under Windows. However, OpenSSL uses /dev/random by default, so there is no improvement using it explicitly.
Only scenario might be when you need faster random numbers generator, as /dev/random is quite slow and you start vanitygen very often. Then you can for example use /dev/urandom (but in this case you expose yourself to small but perhaps exploitable possibility that the seeds for generated addresses will be related). Certified hardware random numbers generators would be preferred in this case (some recent Intel and VIA CPUs have one).
or you can get some random bytes file ftom http://www.random.org/ and use it as your imput
