building a true RNG (was: Quantum Computing ...)

[Jack Lloyd]

On Tue, 23 Jul 2002, John S. Denker wrote:

>  -- I am told (but don't understand) that there might exist
>     a weaker hash that somehow does require whitening.  This
>     is the point of the conversation.  Please address this
>     point if you can.

Perhaps they were refering to something like what is done in the
/dev/random driver, where inputs are mixed in using a simple polynomial
scheme whose exact details (or name) escapes me at the moment. This is
basically because it's called during interupts, and you might not want to
be calling out to something expensive like SHA-1 right then. Then when
someone reads from the device the output is derived from the internal pool
using SHA-1.

Regards,
 Jack


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