On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, Anonymous wrote:
> Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that there will be a hardware RNG,
> well designed and carefully analyzed, installed on nearly every Intel
> based system that is manufactured after 1999. There is no need for a
> third party board, at least not on Intel architectures.
At least not on Intel architectures *with Intel(TM) processors*. And even
that assumes that this feature will *continue* to exist on the processors,
which is by no means guaranteed. (I'm told that Intel is already mumbling
about moving it into the support chipset instead, and I can easily see
that it might exist only in some variants.)
> ...Within the next few years,
> any system configured as a crypto server or gateway will have built in
> hardware RNGs provided by the manufacturer.
That would be nice. It's a little too early to be sure of that yet. Oh,
and by the way, crypto belongs on all the machines, not just the servers
and gateways. (Or the machines originally configured as such -- one nice
thing about Linux crypto software is that you can turn cast-off desktop
machines into excellent crypto gateways.)
And will those hardware RNGs be subject to export control? Betcha they
will, assuming export control survives legal challenges. If this isn't
"enabling technology", I don't know what is...
Henry Spencer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
