Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-24 Thread Ben Laurie
Bram Cohen wrote: > > On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Peter Fairbrother wrote: > > > Bram Cohen wrote: > > > > > You only have to do it once at startup to get enough entropy in there. > > > > If your machine is left on for months or years the seed entropy would become > > a big target. If your PRNG status

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-22 Thread Bram Cohen
On Thu, 20 Sep 2001, Nomen Nescio wrote: > If the internal circuitry did output a 60Hz sine wave then regularities > would still be visible after this kind of whitener. It is a rather > mild cleanup of the signal. It does mask patterns to an extent, possibly pushing them inside the margin for e

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-21 Thread Bill Stewart
> >> It's not that stupid, as feeding the PRNG from i810_rng at the kernel > >> level would be resource intensive, > > > > You only have to do it once at startup to get enough entropy in there. > >If your machine is left on for months or years the seed entropy would become >a big target. If your

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-20 Thread David Wagner
Bill Frantz wrote: >At 2:17 PM -0700 9/19/01, Theodore Tso wrote: >>It turns out that with the Intel 810 RNG, it's even worse because >>there's no way to bypass the hardware "whitening" which the 810 chip >>uses. > >Does anyone know what algorithm the "whitening" uses? Just like von Neumann's un

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-20 Thread Bill Frantz
At 2:17 PM -0700 9/19/01, Theodore Tso wrote: >It turns out that with the Intel 810 RNG, it's even worse because >there's no way to bypass the hardware "whitening" which the 810 chip >uses. Hence, if the 810 random number generator fails, and starts >sending something that's close to a pure 60 HZ

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-20 Thread Pawel Krawczyk
On Wed, Sep 19, 2001 at 05:17:18PM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote: > One of the things which I've always been worried about with the 810 > hardware random number generators in general is how to protect against > their failing silently. My original design intention here was that > this be done in a us

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-20 Thread Nomen Nescio
Ted Tso writes: > It turns out that with the Intel 810 RNG, it's even worse because > there's no way to bypass the hardware "whitening" which the 810 chip > uses. Hence, if the 810 random number generator fails, and starts > sending something that's close to a pure 60 HZ sine wave to the > whiten

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Peter Fairbrother
Bram, I need _lots_ of random-looking bits to use as covertraffic, so I'm using continuous reseeding (of a BBS PRNG) using i810_rng output on i386 platform as well as other sources (the usual suspects plus CD latency plus an optional USB feed-through rng device a bit like a dongle). I don't use a

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Enzo Michelangeli
- Original Message - From: "Theodore Tso" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "John Gilmore" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Pawel Krawczyk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Bram Cohen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTE

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Bram Cohen
On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Theodore Tso wrote: > One of the things which I've always been worried about with the 810 > hardware random number generators in general is how to protect against > their failing silently. That certainly is a concern, although no more of a concern it is with the even faulti

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Bram Cohen
On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, John Gilmore wrote: > Also, the PRNG in /dev/random and /dev/urandom may someday be broken > by analytical techniques. The more diverse sources of true or > apparent randomness that we can feed into it, the less likely it is > that a successful theoretical attack on the PRNG

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Bram Cohen
On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Peter Fairbrother wrote: > Bram Cohen wrote: > > > You only have to do it once at startup to get enough entropy in there. > > If your machine is left on for months or years the seed entropy would become > a big target. If your PRNG status is compromised then all future uses

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Theodore Tso
On Wed, Sep 19, 2001 at 01:50:53PM -0700, John Gilmore wrote: > The real-RNG in the Intel chip generates something like 75 kbits/sec > of processed random bits. These are merely wasted if nobody reads them > before it generates 75kbits more in the next second. > > I suggest that if application p

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread John Gilmore
The real-RNG in the Intel chip generates something like 75 kbits/sec of processed random bits. These are merely wasted if nobody reads them before it generates 75kbits more in the next second. I suggest that if application programs don't read all of these bits out of /dev/intel-rng (or whatever

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Peter Fairbrother
> Bram Cohen wrote: >> On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Pawel Krawczyk wrote: [..] >> It's not that stupid, as feeding the PRNG from i810_rng at the kernel >> level would be resource intensive, > > You only have to do it once at startup to get enough entropy in there. If your machine is left on for months

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Bill Frantz
At 1:12 AM -0700 9/19/01, Bram Cohen wrote: >Of course, there's the religion of people who say that /dev/random output >'needs' to contain 'all real' entropy, despite the absolute zero increase >in security this results in and the disastrous effect it can have on >performance. If I am generating

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Pawel Krawczyk
On Wed, Sep 19, 2001 at 01:12:44AM -0700, Bram Cohen wrote: > > not necessary in general case > Since most applications reading /dev/random don't want random numbers > anyway? Here I meant exactly what you said about /dev/random religion. On the other hand feeding the /dev/random with i810 durin

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-19 Thread Bram Cohen
On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Pawel Krawczyk wrote: > On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 01:44:57PM -0700, Bram Cohen wrote: > > > > What is important, it *doesn't* feed the built-in Linux kernel PRNG > > > available in /dev/urandom and /dev/random, so you have either to only > > > use the hardware generator or fee

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-18 Thread Pawel Krawczyk
On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 01:44:57PM -0700, Bram Cohen wrote: > > What is important, it *doesn't* feed the built-in Linux kernel PRNG > > available in /dev/urandom and /dev/random, so you have either to only > > use the hardware generator or feed /dev/urandom yourself. > That's so ... stupid. Why g

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-17 Thread Pawel Krawczyk
On Sat, Sep 15, 2001 at 10:16:27AM -0700, Carl Ellison wrote: > I'm told that the LINUX 2.4 kernel comes with the RNG driver > built-in, but I haven't tried that. It works almost out of box, kernel detects the chip and if you have the necessary device file created (character 10,183 AFAIK) you ca

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-15 Thread Carl Ellison
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 09:51 AM 9/14/2001 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >I'm rooting around for stuff on hardware random number generation. > >More specificially, I'm looking to see if anyone has done any >entropy-collection at the chip-architecture level as part of the >

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-15 Thread Sandy Harris
"R. A. Hettinga" wrote: > > I'm rooting around for stuff on hardware random number generation. RFC 1750 is a standard reference. There's a draft of a rewrite on ietf.org. > More specificially, I'm looking to see if anyone has done any > entropy-collection at the chip-architecture level as part

Re: chip-level randomness?

2001-09-15 Thread Eric Rescorla
"R. A. Hettinga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I'm rooting around for stuff on hardware random number generation. > > More specificially, I'm looking to see if anyone has done any > entropy-collection at the chip-architecture level as part of the logic of a > chip. > > I saw somewhere the intel

chip-level randomness?

2001-09-14 Thread R. A. Hettinga
I'm rooting around for stuff on hardware random number generation. More specificially, I'm looking to see if anyone has done any entropy-collection at the chip-architecture level as part of the logic of a chip. I saw somewhere the intel had done it as part of the Pentium, for instance, but I can