Von Neumann counseled Shannon to call it entropy because no one
really knows what entropy is. ;-)
I wanted to say that it's inherently problematic to use things like the
randomness in the interarrival time of events like interrupts, etc.
to gather entropy -- Ted has touched on this with his comment on
solid state disk drives, etc.
A bit stream may have 1 bit of entropy per bit of message (i.e. an
entropy of 1), and therefore be incompressible -- perhaps what Schwartz
thinks he means when he says truly random -- and be entirely predictable.
We want nicely-distributed random numbers without apparent bias,
with an apparent entropy of one, so that 10 bits of key material
is really 10 bits of key; what makes such numbers cryptographically
useful is that no amount of collected material enables us to
predict bits anywhere else in the stream (past or future, if viewed
temporally).
I have given Herr Schwartz enough of my grossmutterlich Freundlichkeit
for one day. Ppppt.
- M
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