BMF wrote: > Dan Kaminsky <d...@doxpara.com> wrote: > > Don't we have hardware RNG in most motherboard chipsets nowadays? > > Do we? By what mechanism do they operate? Thermal noise seems the > easiest way to go although I have always preferred the idea of > sampling random radioactive decay simply for the purity of the > immediate result. What is the quality of the entropy of the devices > you speak of? How fast do they generate entropy? I have heard nothing > about this. How could I tell if my machine had hw rng built in? > > Some i810 series chipsets have hw rng. There is also the Intel 80802 > Firmware Hub chip that nobody seems to use anymore. I have heard of > people pointing webcams at lava lamps and such to get random numbers. Check out Markus Jacobsson et al, "A Practical Secure Physical Random Bit Generator", 1998, using the turbulence of airflow inside the drive as the source of randomness. Can't do much better than that. -- Charles Polisher
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