>> Either you trust RNG or you don't. There is no middle ground.
>
>I just trust hardware RNG to be more random then keypresses. Yes there
>is middle ground.
Taking the least significant bits of a fast timer between keypresses is a
very good way of generating entropy. I'd trust it more than some unknown
hardware generator. The same is true of network packets.
The key is to have a timer that is much faster than the network or
keyboard interfaces. There must also be a _minimal_ amount of "jitter" to
the keypresses or packet arrival times -- in practice it would probably be
extremely difficult to make the times regular enough to attack the RNG.
That's all it takes to make some of the least significant timer bits a
good source of entropy.
Dave
David Whysong dwhysong@physics.ucsb.edu
Astrophysics graduate student University of California, Santa Barbara
My public PGP keys are on my web page - http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~dwhysong
DSS PGP Key 0x903F5BD6 : FE78 91FE 4508 106F 7C88 1706 B792 6995 903F 5BD6
D-H PGP key 0x5DAB0F91 : BC33 0F36 FCCD E72C 441F 663A 72ED 7FB7 5DAB 0F91
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