[699] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Random numbers from the '60's...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Frantz)
Tue May 6 00:30:59 1997
In-Reply-To: <v03102807af9443e0de5f@[205.162.51.35]>
Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 21:21:03 -0700
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com>
At 7:14 PM -0700 5/5/97, Jim McCoy wrote:
>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?
The only bright point in the whole gathering entropy mess is that if you
properly combine 14 bad sources with one good one, you get good output.
Almost the only place in computer science where you can say this. :-)
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