According to Intel, the i7-4770 support the Secure Key feature (RDRAND): > > http://ark.intel.com/de/products/75122/Intel-Core-i7-4770-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz This can be confirmed when looking at /proc/cpuinfo: > flags : [...] rdrand [...] I even double-checked with "cpuid" as described here: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand#Overview The returned value of "cpuid" is shown below: > eax in eax ebx ecx edx > 00000000 0000000d 756e6547 6c65746e 49656e69 > 00000001 000306c3 04100800 7ffafbff bfebfbff > [...] So for eax == 0x01 bit 30 of ecx is definitely set to 0x01 (thus RDRAND should be available). However, "modprobe intel-rng" fails with: > ERROR: could not insert 'intel_rng': No such device When looking at the PCI device IDs of the system via "lspci -vnn" it turns out that there is a device "8086:244e": > 00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge [8086:244e] > (rev d5) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode]) > Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0 > Bus: primary=00, secondary=03, subordinate=04, sec-latency=0 > Capabilities: <access denied> This exact PCI device ID is commented out in "intel-rng.c": > > https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/char/hw_random/intel-rng.c#L118 So, even though there is a CPU that supposedly supports RDRAND (according to its manufacturer), its hardware RNG cannot be used.