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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:05
Alex Alten (Alten@Home.Com)
Sat, 23 Jan 1999 09:27:26 -0800
At 01:08 PM 1/22/99 -0800, bram wrote:
>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.
>
If Intel will vouch for the "randomness" of it then I think that will be
good enough for me. Having a real RNG available on every shipping PC
would be great boon to those of us who ship pure software products. Of
course then Microsoft will need to come out with Windows 2001 that includes
an RNG API of some 300 functions.
If it didn't work then some cryptographic researcher would find out, publish
his results on the web, Intel stock would drop by $10, they would vigorously
deny it for a couple of weeks, then finally they would fix it in the next
production run, and run an ad campaign "Intel RNG Inside". At some point
it would be accepted by everyone, including hardcore coderpunk's mothers, as
a good RNG and the stock would recover by $30.
BTW, does anyone know how many bits/sec the thing would produce?
- Alex
--Alex Alten
Alten@Home.Com Alten@TriStrata.Com
P.O. Box 11406 Pleasanton, CA 94588 USA (925) 417-0159
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:05