chip-level randomness?

[Enzo Michelangeli]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Theodore Tso" <tytso at MIT.EDU>
To: "John Gilmore" <gnu at toad.com>
Cc: "Pawel Krawczyk" <kravietz at aba.krakow.pl>; "Bram Cohen"
<bram at gawth.com>; <cryptography at wasabisystems.com>; <tytso at 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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