[Cryptography] Randomness from network hardware?

[Bill Stewart]

At 01:50 PM 10/28/2013, Jerry Leichter wrote:
>Ethernet is supposed to back off randomly after a collision.
...
>Do current interfaces, perhaps in some test mode
>(which a special driver could get at during boot),
>provide access to anything that could be used as (part of) a random seed?

I'd be surprised if most hardware or drivers makes that visible,
especially since "ethernet" is full-duplex with switches
rather than half-duplex with CSMA/CD these days.
It's not something you'd normally want the CPU to know.
Maybe some wifi gear makes it more visible,
but if you had deeply debuggable wifi there'd be a lot more sources
of random noise available.