Lava lamp random number generator made useful?

[Thor Lancelot Simon]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 01:20:22PM -0400, James Cloos wrote:
> >>>>> "IanG" == IanG  <iang at systemics.com> writes:
> 
> IanG> Nope, sorry, didn't follow it.  What is BOM, SoC, A plug, gerber?
> 
> Bill Of Materials  -- cost of the raw hardware
> System on (a) Chip -- microchip with CPU, RAM, FLASH, etc
> USB A Plug         -- physical flat-four interface; think USB key drive
> gerber             -- file format for hardware designs
> 
> A system-on-a-chip which has rng and usb-client hardware on board (aka
> on chip) should fit in a package which looks just like a USB key drive.

I looked into this at moderate length about two years ago.  One very
attractive choice was the cheapest Motorola Coldfire with their onboard
crypto block, because you get the hashing for free and don't waste host
resources transferring in data you'll then distill by hash -- or hashing
it.

As a source of random numbers, I was figuring to use one of the publically
available thermal noise designs plus the cheapest HiFn PCI crypto chip
(which features a multi-oscillator RNG I'm reasonably familiar with) since
the Coldfire with crypto has both USB and PCI on it.

Thor

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