CPRNGs are still an issue.

Paul Crowley paul at ciphergoth.org
Mon Dec 15 15:56:52 EST 2008


Damien Miller wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, James A. Donald wrote:
>> If one uses a higher resolution counter - sub
>> microsecond - and times multiple disk accesses, one gets
>> true physical randomness, since disk access times are
>> effected by turbulence, which is physically true
>> random.
> 
> Until someone runs your software on a SSD instead of a HDD. Oops.

How would software that attempted to measure the entropy of the incoming 
seek times behave when an SSD replaced an HDD?  Would the reduction in 
measured entropy be proportional to the reduction in entropy from the 
attacker's point of view?
-- 
   __
\/ o\ Paul Crowley
/\__/ www.ciphergoth.org

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