[149303] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: [Cryptography] cheap sources of entropy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James A. Donald)
Sun Feb 2 16:07:46 2014
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 22:50:33 +1000
From: "James A. Donald" <Jamesd@echeque.com>
To: Jerry Leichter <leichter@lrw.com>
In-Reply-To: <887284A4-62AE-48EA-9C2E-69E1B3032558@lrw.com>
Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>,
Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Errors-To: cryptography-bounces+crypto.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@metzdowd.com
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.
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