cryptography  

Making One-time pad using the soundcard

Paul N
Sat, 17 Feb 2001 11:46:12 -0800


It is secure to make a onetime pad using 16 bit input from soundcard using the 
following algorithm?

Each bit of the output is the result of XOR-ing all 16 bits from the input 
sample... so, for making one byte of "one-time pad", I need 8 samples (16*8 
bits or 16 bytes) of input?

Of course I allow this only if the cllipping doesn't occurs and there is 
nosilence....

[I would not feel particularly comfortable merely combining the bits
of a single sample -- distilling entropy using a hash function and
large blocks of input would probably work out better. I'm sure there
will be plenty of opinions around here. --Perry]