Pseudo-Random vs. True Random (2012)

Re:Pseudo-Random vs. True Random (2012) by ggm on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @12:56AM (#23841488)

How many gates would it cost, to include the various quantum like random sources as hardware on-die?

Open gate transistors, thermal effects, radiative effects...

(Not that there are not risks, and it is a mistake to assume on-die is not risky)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Pseudo-Random vs. True Random (2012) by jesboat on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:05AM (#23841548)

They already do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand has been around on x86 for a while.

Unfortunately, they're essentially unauditable and sometimes frightfully broken, eg https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd...

Fun times

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Pseudo-Random vs. True Random (2012) by ggm on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:13AM (#23841595)

So Linus is fine with it, and FreeBSD fed it into yarrow/fortuna which is the kernel boot time initialized entropy pool.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Pseudo-Random vs. True Random (2012) by ChrisSD on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:52AM (#23841805)

Putting it into a pool is fine. It can be XORed with other sources.

And if at boot time there's no stored entropy and no other sources, then it's better than nothing until more sources become available.

[ Parent | on HN ]