Toshiba shows 2Mbps hardware RNG

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Mon Feb 11 00:00:14 EST 2008


Danilo Gligoroski <gligoroski at yahoo.com> writes:
>At 04:02 AM 2/10/2008, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>>"Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com> writes:
>>
>><\snip
>>So your potential market for this is people running Monte Carlo simulations
>>who don't like PRNGs.  Seems a bit of a limited market...
>
>I think that the market is a little bit bigger than just applications running
>Monte Carlo simulations. For example, Gambling industry - which is also multi-
>billion industry world-wide.

The security target for the gambling industry is to pass (incredibly
stringent) auditing requirements.  A simple PRNG seeded from a factory-set
initial value is fine as long as it's been certified to death.  The impression
I got from this some time ago from people who work in this area was that they
really wanted deterministic PRNGs rather than nondeterministic hardware ones,
although at the time I didn't ask whether it was because it made certification
easier or because they just didn't trust unpredictable RNGs ("unpredictable"
meaning that an infinite number of environmental variations can cause it to
potentially do things that you don't want).

Peter.

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