[Cryptography] My comments regarding using CPU jitter for random number generation

Bill Frantz frantz at pwpconsult.com
Tue Oct 29 23:47:02 EDT 2013


On 10/28/13 at 4:03 PM, tytso at mit.edu wrote:

>Maybe someone can prove that there is more entropy because of some
>instability between the oscillator used by the CPU clock and the one
>used by the ethernet NIC, and so I'm being hopelessly
>over-conservative.  Perhaps; but until we know for sure, using a
>similar analysis to what I described above, I'd much rather be slow
>than be potentially insecure.

And in 5 years time, someone will build hardware that uses the 
same oscillator for both the CPU clock and the Ethernet NIC, 
doing to clock jitter entropy what solid state disks did to Don 
Davis' "Cryptographic randomness from air turbulence in disk 
drives" approach.

Cheers - Bill

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