[Cryptography] cheap sources of entropy

[John Denker]

On 01/20/2014 09:46 AM, dj at deadhat.com wrote:
> Paranoid Entropy Trap:
>   The tendency to get no entropy because you turned off all the sources of
> entropy, because you don't trust any of them.

Very nice.

Conversely:  Demented Squirrel Fail:
  The claim that you have 5000 sources of food buried in the forest,
  even though you can't be bothered to defend them or even check on 
  them.

Similarly:  Knuth's chapter on random number generators starts 
with an example where combining a whole bunch of lousy RNGs
does not make the result better.  It makes it worse.

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My point is that it makes more sense to have one or two
properly-calibrated well-defended entropy sources than
some vast number of "sources" that might produce entropy
or might not.