On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 08:12:09PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > Semiconductor laser based RNG with rates in the gigabits per second. > > http://www.physorg.com/news148660964.html > > My take: neat, but not as important as simply including a decent > hardware RNG (even a slow one) in all PC chipsets would be.
I've been thinking that much better than a chipset addition (which is only accessible by the OS kernel in most environments) would be a simple ring-3 (or equivalent) accessible instruction that writes 32 or 64 bits of randomness from a per-core hardware RNG, something like ; write 32 bits of entropy from the hardware RNG to eax register rdrandom %eax Which would allow user applications to access a good hardware RNG directly, in addition to allowing the OS to read bits to seed the system PRNG (/dev/random, CryptoGenRandom, or similar) I think the JVM in particular could benefit from such an extension, as the abstractions it puts into place otherwise prevent most of the methods one might use to gather high-quality entropy for a PRNG seed. -Jack --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com