[39795] in Cypherpunks
Re: "random" number seeds vs. Netscape
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Blossom)
Thu Sep 21 19:09:41 1995
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 15:45:53 -0700
From: Eric Blossom <eb@comsec.com>
To: karlton@netscape.com
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com, jsw@netscape.com
In-Reply-To: <43psn2$6ug@tera.mcom.com> (karlton@netscape.com)
>
> What I would like:
>
> Any OS has access to a number of real-world physical sources of
> randomness. This information is not made available to a user level
> process. How long did that last seek take? Was there any noise on
> the microphone? It would be good if the OS could gather that
> information and make some set of bits available to any process that
> asks. Having this be part of all OSes would make my job easier.
We've got a *real* hardware random number generator that was developed
for our secure phones. If you are seriously interested, we can
glue the RNG onto the end of a serial port for you. It generates
about 8000 bits of uncorrelated noise / second.
Eric Blossom
COMSEC Partners
707-577-0409
