[4014] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Intel announcements at RSA '99
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ben Laurie)
Wed Jan 20 16:20:10 1999
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 20:56:35 +0000
From: Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk>
To: Steve Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
Steve Bellovin wrote:
>
> Intel has announced a number of interesting things at the RSA conference.
> The most important, to me, is the inclusion of a hardware random number
> generator (based on thermal noise) in the Pentium III instruction set.
> They also announced hardware support for IPSEC.
An interesting question (for me, at least) is: how will I know that the
hardware RNG is really producing stuff based on thermal noise, and not,
say, on the serial number, some secret known to Intel, and a PRNG?
Cheers,
Ben.
--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi
