On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Elazar Leibovich <elaz...@gmail.com> wrote: > Instead of assuming, you should've used Google ;-)
Yes, but I am at work. ;-) > > To my (limited, I'm far from a crypto expert) understanding, Intel of course > also seeds the PRNG with a true random number generator, and it complies > NIST standard for randomness. Well, I took your admonition to heart, and Googled. The link you provided > http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/11/17/the-difference-between-rdrand-and-rdseed says that Intel have two instructions, RDRAND and RDSEED, and the latter is supposed to be a "True RNG" (TRNG) or an "ehanced non-deterministic random number generator" (ENRNG). I have not found a description of how RDSEED works anywhere (if anyone knows, please tell me). According to NIST, http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/random_number.html "true" and "non-deterministic" RNGs are one and the same thing, and what we call PRNG is terms "deterministic RNG", or DRNG. I have no idea what "enhanced NRGS" might be - Google returned nothing useful to all the variants that I tried so far (full words, abbreviations, etc.) So much for terminology. According to the same NIST page, there are no NIST-approved TRNGs today. What "compliant" means on the Intel page above is not quite clear to me. I'd say that it is up to Intel to prove that their TRNG design is truly non-deterministic. So far I have not seen anything about it. (This does not mean that documentation does not exist, or has not been peer-reviewed, or whatever. It means exactly what I wrote.) Designing a truly non-deterministic source is very difficult. various considerations and discussions 8can* be googled for. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
