[7266] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: random seed generation without user interaction?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arnold G. Reinhold)
Tue Jun 6 14:31:45 2000
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Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 09:01:56 -0400
To: John Kelsey <kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com>, cryptography@c2.net
From: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>
Cc: Jeff.Hodges@stanford.edu
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At 3:15 AM -0500 6/6/2000, John Kelsey wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>At 07:08 PM 6/5/00 -0700, Jeff.Hodges@stanford.edu wrote:
>>So I'm curious about what all methods do folks currently use (on NT
>>and unix) to generate a random seed in the case where user
>>interaction (e.g. the ol' mouse pointer waving or keyboard tapping
>>approaches) isn't a viable option?=A0
>
>If the machine has a microphone, you can get some unpredictable bits
>from internal noise in the circuit, and also from real noise in the
>room the computer's in. There's probably a tiny bit of entropy
>available even in the worst case imaginable from network packet
>arrival times, if you can get them.
I have a page listing inexpensive noise sources that can be use with=20
a computer's sound input port:
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/truenoise.html
Arnold Reinhold
