6/19 Here is another question for all you knowledgable crypto people.
How bad is the ability of a PC to generate random numbers for
cryptography? Is this at all a limiting factor in PC based
encryption? If someone were to build a little box that made
random numbers based on a physical process that was provably
uncorrelated, would that interest people?
\_ PC's running reasonable OS'es generate good random numbers. -tom
\_ Depending on the sources of entropy used, a ordinary PC
can generate sufficiently random numbers for use with
cryptography. Look at how ssh does it for more info.
\_ P3s can generate random numbers based on thermal noise, right?
\_ I don't know. There IS a thermal diode on it, but I'm not
sure of the response time. Actually, that might be an
interesting little problem/implementation to do, since a
lot of devices have thermal diodes these days, for over
temperature protection. -nweaver |