[Cryptography] A TRNG review per day: Turbid

Bill Cox waywardgeek at gmail.com
Wed Oct 29 17:24:31 EDT 2014


On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 3:35 AM, Bill Stewart <billstewart at pobox.com> wrote:

> At 10:09 AM 10/27/2014, Bill Cox wrote:
>
>> - A sound card used by Turbid cannot be used for input, meaning most
>> users need a second sound card.
>>
>
> There are two times that you need good randomness
> - system initialization
> - later.
> You can use pseudo-random generators later, as long as you've seeded them
> with good initial entropy, and you'll usually have system entropy coming in
> from a range of devices and events.
>
> During your system initialization, it's not a problem if you want to
> borrow the sound card to crunch up some random entropy, and most users
> aren't going to need to use the sound card for audio input until
> everything's up to speed and the user interface has fired up.  It's
> probably fine for that.
>
>
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Good points.  I suppose Linux distros should look at borrowing the mic
input for a fraction of a second on boot to refresh the entropy pool.

Bill
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