very high speed hardware RNG

[Jerry Leichter]

On Dec 28, 2008, at 8:12 PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

>
> Semiconductor laser based RNG with rates in the gigabits per second.
>
> http://www.physorg.com/news148660964.html
>
> My take: neat, but not as important as simply including a decent
> hardware RNG (even a slow one) in all PC chipsets would be.
True.

The thing that bothers me about this description is the too-easy jump  
between "chaotic" and "random".  They're different concepts, and  
chaotic doesn't imply random in a cryptographic sense:  It may be  
possible to induce bias or even some degree of predictability in a  
chaotic system by manipulating its environment.  I believe there are  
also chaotic systems that are hard to predict in the forward  
direction, but easy to run backwards, at least sometimes.

That's not to say this system isn't good - it probably is - but just  
saying its chaotic shouldn't be enough.

BTW, a link from this article - at least when I looked at it - went to http://www.physorg.com/news147698804.html 
  : "Quantum Computing: Entanglement May Not Be Necessary".  There are  
still tons of surprises in the quantum computing arena....
                                                         -- Jerry


>
>
> Perry
> -- 
> Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> The Cryptography Mailing List
> Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com