[697] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Random numbers from the '60's...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim McCoy)
Mon May 5 23:58:05 1997
In-Reply-To: <199705052337.TAA24418@jekyll.piermont.com>
Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 18:14:50 -0800
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: Jim McCoy <mccoy@communities.com>
Perry writes:
>Phil Karn writes:
>>[...I]t's been my
>> experience that the microphone preamp on a typical soundblaster card
>> is quite noisy. Just crank the gain all the way up and hash the resulting
>> noise. If you do have a microphone connected, so much the better.
>
>I'm not sure that I trust this, if only because much of the "noise"
>might not be thermal noise but instead things like the board picking
>up stuff from the rest of the machine, most of which is decidedly
>non-random...
If the preamp picks up noise which is internally generated by the computer
then the situation will end up being no worse than without the soundcard
input and if the system does manage to pick up some external entropy, so
much the better. How can this situation be any worse than the current
lack of randomness on PCs?
jim
