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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:04
bram (bram@gawth.com)
Fri, 22 Jan 1999 13:08:02 -0800 (PST)
On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, David R. Conrad wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Steve Bellovin wrote:
>
> > Intel has announced a number of interesting things at the RSA conference.
> > The most important, to me, is the inclusion of a hardware random number
> > generator (based on thermal noise) in the Pentium III instruction set.
Yaay! This has been warranted for quite some time.
> Doesn't seem to me that the new features are of much use to anyone. As
> others have pointed out, it's quite difficult to assure oneself that the
> RNG is true and not a fair PRNG in disguise.
It doesn't really matter. As long as there's a way of querying the cpu to
find out if it really is an RNG, your software is better off than it ever
has been as far as accessing a 'true' source of entropy goes.
Remember that the 'entropyness' of the RNG is something the software must
always simply trust, since it comes from the outside world. I would much
rather trust something documented as being an RNG than, for example,
relying on the skew in hard drive accesses. Not only is it a much faster
and more reliable source of entropy, it's also a lot less wear on the poor
hard drive.
-Bram
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:04