[Cryptography] cheap sources of entropy

[James A. Donald]

On 2014-02-02 21:40, Jerry Leichter wrote:
> There's no point in discussing this any further:  Those who say "not so" would (a) have a great deal of difficulty proving a negative; (b) have little interest in (in our opinion) wasting our time looking for something that isn't there.  So it's on you:  If you feel such variations will survive - prove it!

If all these layers make the timing of data arrival more predictable, 
rather than less predictable, then, if predictable, should show some 
simple, rather obvious, pattern.

Which it does not.

If randomness is suppressed due to engineering efforts to make things 
simple and predictable, then the result should be simple and predictable.

Which it is not.

To suppress timing randomness, you need to gate events to a low 
frequency clock in one layer or another.   A low frequency clock period 
is not commonly apparent.

It does not matter how many layers there are between the virtual and the 
real.  If none of them gate events to a low frequency clock, the 
additional layers will only add randomness and reduce predictability.

Now if you were proposing that the NSA was generating fake randomness, 
then the fact that things look random would be unconvincing, but since 
we have an underlying physically random process, then if something 
orderly is suppressing this randomness, the outcome would be orderly.