On 12/19/05, Michael Alexander Hamburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello to the list, > > I'm working on a cryptography project, and one of the things the project > requires is a moderately high-bandwidth source of truly random numbers. > To accomplish this, I set up OpenBSD on a board with a (Soekris) Hifn 7955 > accelerator card, but the rate I'm getting by reading out of /dev/srandom > is pretty low (200B/s). However, this has to be coming from the card, > because the machine has no other reasonable source of entropy other than > the network: no hard drive, no keyboard, etc. > > Now, unless the card's specs are deceptive, its random number generator > must support a higher rate than this: it claims 70 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman > key exchanges per second, and each such key exchange requires a full > 1024-bit random number, which comes out to 8.8kB/s. The minimum data rate > for my application is about 1k/s, and I would strongly prefer not to use a > PRNG. > > Is there a more direct way to query the RNG? random(4) claims that the > RNG is not mapped directly to a device (/dev/random is not currently > implemented), but rather that it periodically refreshes the system entropy > pool. Is there a way to force this to occur more often, or to transfer > more data? Or do the numbers lie, and I'm getting all the data I can? > > Thanks for your time, > Mike Hamburg > > P.S. I'm looking at different sources of random numbers, and cost and > integration are important factors. Would an AMD Geode LX or VIA C3 or C7 > processor's on-board RNG provide a significantly higher data rate than > a Soekris card, at a comparable quality? >
What about taking a cord that's plugged into the sound card port and microphone port, and reading in from the microphone? I've heard that is a pretty good source of randomness (all that annoying feedback), although I may be completely wrong, feel free to correct me if I am. Jason
