The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator

Re:The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator by hamburglar on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @06:48PM (#6060544)

The article is a bit vague about what exactly they're trying to say. What was unexpected? I read it three times before I decided they're comparing a lousy homegrown software RNG to the Pi's hardware RNG, which turns out to be good. Yes? Why would that be unexpected?

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Re:The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator by lambda on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @10:50PM (#6061506)

The impression I got was that the existence of a hardware random number generator was unexpected.

The rest was just demonstrating that it works, and produces pretty reliable random output. In order to do that, they used a standard tool that tests randomness. But it's nice to make sure your randomness test tool is actually good; so using it on a known-bad RNG, and seeing that it does fail, is a good way to demonstrate that.

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Re:The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator by wodenokoto on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @07:01PM (#6060591)

The way I read it was that it is surprising that it is there at all.

Apparently a lot of android devices don't have one, and don't have time to collect pseudo random data for their software rng to make secure certificates when you boot it for the first time, which posses a security risk for android devices.

That's how I read the article in relation to recent news.

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Re:The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator by steevdave on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @08:53PM (#6061043)

Actually most ARM processors do have a hardware RNG, just that few companies write a driver for them

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Re:The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator by scruss on Thursday July 18, 2013 @07:33AM (#6062875)

I wrote the article.

I'm guessing not everyone on HN is a huge fan of “Strictly Ballroom”, as the title is a key quote for dance movie otaku. It was also a weak joke about testing for random numbers; I'm imagining a little subroutine in a constant state of surprise when it encounters the next random number.

While I'm not sure if I implemented it correctly, RANDU isn't some ‘lousy homegrown software RNG’. It was the standard RNG for IBM mainframes in the late 1960s.

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Re:The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator by Dylan16807 on Thursday July 18, 2013 @02:27AM (#6062095)

Especially confusing is when the article suddenly says "This is not random". But oh what it means is that the upcoming part of the article, on a completely different topic from the Pi, is not random.

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