On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 09:07:03AM -0800, Gus Wirth wrote: >At 11:01 03/16/2005 -0500, George Georgalis wrote: >>On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 08:14:25PM -0800, Stewart Stremler wrote: >>>begin quoting George Georgalis as of Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 10:33:36PM -0500: >>>[snip] >>>> the subject "hardware fingerprinting" is no less contiguous then the >>>> thread. ...if you don't reset your ttl then they will really know it was >>>> you, the men in the black helicopters don't even have to unerase your >>>> disks to tell what you've been up to. >>> >>>Ah, I see. Since all data comes from the network and none of it of >>>any worth is created locally, they have an archive of all the bytes >>>you've downloaded anyway, and so they know what your system may look >>>like. >> >>Yes, now the fire is burning... >> >>>With regards to the fingerprinting... it seems like a trivial thing >>>to fuzz the clock skew randomly, and so render the whole scheme useless. >> >>I don't see people skewing their clocks for anonymity any time soon. >>Besides isn't the test pretty short lived, your clock would have to >>be changed between test packets, it's not simply a matter of adding >>a sine wave slew method and changing the clock every hour. Though, I >>haven't taken the time to really read the article. > >You may already have some degree of clock randomness and not even know it. >One of the methods used to reduce EMI (ElectroMagnetic Interference) is to >use a variable clock rate to achieve spread-spectrum operation. This >reduces the single frequency harmonic strength and allows the equipment to >pass the FCC test for emissions. It doesn't carry over to the peripheral >clocks yet that I know of but it is on newer motherboards already for RAM >and CPU clocks. > >>>-Stewart "Need a cron syntax for 'random', I see." Stremler >> >>probably should do it with mon, so there is no concurrent time reset >>overlap. >> >>(Was it Barry G that came up with the aquarium based random number >>generator a few years back?) > >Sounds interesting. What was the source of the random numbers? An optical >sensor on the bubbles from the aerator or a microphone? Sonic emmisions >aren't as random as you might think. Just ask carl.
I think it was temperature based, but we all know true randomness requires human intervention. ;-) Hasn't spread-spectrum been a bios option for a while? Not having applied my flimsy electrical knowledge on its operation and not having any interference problems, I always accepted the assumption it slows things down and never enabled it. // George -- George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
