[9409] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: chip-level randomness?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Enzo Michelangeli)
Thu Sep 20 00:10:51 2001
Message-ID: <01a701c14164$b567d360$0200000a@fechk.local>
Reply-To: "Enzo Michelangeli" <em@em.no-ip.com>
From: "Enzo Michelangeli" <em@who.net>
To: <cryptography@wasabisystems.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 07:37:50 +0800
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Theodore Tso" <tytso@MIT.EDU>
To: "John Gilmore" <gnu@toad.com>
Cc: "Pawel Krawczyk" <kravietz@aba.krakow.pl>; "Bram Cohen"
<bram@gawth.com>; <cryptography@wasabisystems.com>; <tytso@MIT.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 5:17 AM
Subject: Re: chip-level randomness?
[...]
> On the other hand, for most people, on balance it's probably better
> for the kernel to just blindly trust the 810 random number generator
> to be free from faults (either deliberate or accidentally induced),
> since the alternative (an incompletely seeded RNG) is probably worst
> for most folks.
Not only that: I don't think that feeding predictable input to the entropy
pool is going to make the PRNG's output any worse. If you don't bump up the
entropy estimator (risking a misleading estimate), it's a sort of Pascal's
Wager: you may or may not be better off, but surely you won't be worse off.
Enzo
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