On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 12:49 AM, Robert M. Enger <NANOG@enger.us> wrote:
On 10/11/2012 5:08 PM, Jonathan Lassoff wrote:
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 5:01 PM, shawn wilson <ag4ve.us@gmail.com> wrote:
in the past, i've done many different things to create entropy - encode videos, watch youtube, tcpdump -vvv > /dev/null, compiled a kernel. but, what is best? just whatever gets your cpu to peak or are some tasks better than others?
Personally, I've used and recommend this USB stick: http://www.entropykey.co.uk/
Internally, it uses diodes that are reverse-biased just ever so close to the breakdown voltage such that they randomly flip state back and forth.
Cheers, jof
Intel claims to include a hardware Digital Random Number Generator (DRNG) in its later generation chips. Is their offering inadequate/discredited?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391367,00.asp http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/embedded/innovation/security/walker-article-sec... http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-digital-random-number-generat...
that's good to know about. i'll have to remember it when tech moves along in a year or so. but, right now, i don't think i have that capability. also, i'd prefer to have a chip agnostic solution as a month or so ago, i wanted to create a key on a raspberry pi (should've just copied one over) and it took forever to generate enough entropy - even as i was compiling stuff. after that, i considered tcpdump.