[39578] in Cypherpunks
`Random' seed.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Martin)
Wed Sep 20 09:19:26 1995
From: "Richard Martin" <rmartin@aw.sgi.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 09:15:49 -0400
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Cc: jsw@neon.netscape.com (Jeff Weinstein)
Vaporware which I heard around CFP '95, and have been sort of wondering about
ever since...
Some one told me that some one else [possibly Matt Blaze] had been looking
at how much randomness could be got by forking two child processes which
would just run as asynchronous clocks: whenever the parent program needs a
little `random' bit, it queries both and gives (clock(A) + clock(B) % 2)
or something.
Questions about this [to the list]:
* who has done any [the?] work on this?
* was it found to be useful/good or not?
* what would be the drawbacks to adding this [Yet Another Source Of Entropy]
to the Netscape scheme?
frodo =)
--
Richard Martin
Alias|Wavefront - Toronto Office [Co-op Software Developer, Games Team]
rmartin@aw.sgi.com/g4frodo@cdf.toronto.edu http://www.io.org/~samwise
Trinity College UofT ChemPhysCompSci 9T7+PEY=9T8 Shad Valley Waterloo 1992
