[Cryptography] cheap sources of entropy

[James A. Donald]

On 2014-02-04 07:13, Tom Mitchell wrote:
>
>     Go back to the paper that proposed using turbulence and repeat
>     some of their tests in a virtual environment.  Let us know what
>     you *actually observe*.
>


They made everything artificially simple - because otherwise there are 
so many sources of timing randomness that you could not distinguish the 
turbulence induced timing randomness.

If you look at timing in a complex system, it looks random.

To conclude that something that looks random truly is random, you have 
to understand and measure the underlying causes of randomness.

To isolate and identify /one/ such source of randomness, required them 
to artificially constrain the system in a way that was not realistic, 
nor intended to be realistic.

So their argument, in essence was that when they took all these 
extremely drastic measures to make timing of events predictable, timing 
of events was /still/ not predictable due to underlying physical processes.

 From which we may confidently conclude that in more complex situations, 
timing will be less predictable, not more predictable, because we have 
more sources of randomness, many  poorly characterized sources of 
randomness interacting with other sources of randomness, /one/ of which 
is well characterized.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20140204/3dd8f2f7/attachment.html>