Re: Toshiba shows 2Mbps hardware RNG

[Bill Stewart]

At 07:02 PM 2/9/2008, Peter Gutmann wrote:
I've always wondered why RNG speed is such a big deal for anything but a few
highly specialised applications.  For security use you've got two options:
1. Use it with standard security protocols, in which case you need all of 128
   or so bits every now and then (and very rarely a few thousand bits for
   asymmetric keygen).

One obvious application I can think of is Diffie-Hellman session key generation
for web or email servers that handle lots of sessions.
Sure, you _could_ use PRNGs to generate the keys, with real RNG now and then,
but a fast RNG can help protect you against one popular threat model, which 
is "auditors".

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