In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Warner Losh writes:
>Another good source would be if you had a Cesium clock and a GPS
>receiver. The delay due to atmospherics is another good source of
>random data. This varies +- 25ns and is highly locale dependent. One
>can measure this variance down to the nanosecond easily (giving about
>5 bits of randomness) and with a lot of effort down to the pico second
>level, which would give you about 15 bits of randomness.
A geiger counter and a smoke-detector would be *so much* cheaper
and give more bits per second :-)
>It certainly would be better than nothing and would be a decent source
>of randomness. It would be my expectation that if tests were run to
>measure this randomness and the crypto random tests were applied,
>we'd find a fairly good source.
The trick here is to actually measure the quality of our entropy.
I have asked Markm to provide us with some kernel option which can
be used to get a copy of the entropy so we can study the quality
off it.
BTW: You have *no* idea how much I envy your access to high quality
timing hardware :-)
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Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
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