On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 12:29 PM, John Denker <j...@av8n.com> wrote: > > This discussion will progress more smoothly and more rapidly > if we clarify some of the concepts and terminology. [...] > > Things like clock skew are usually nothing but squish ... not > reliably predictable, but also not reliably unpredictable. > > I'm not interested in squish, and I'm not interested in speculation > about things that "might" be random. I'm interested in things that > /guarantee/ a usable amount of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics > provides such a guarantee.
Clock skew is very well understood. In particular, I've thought about using the DC-to-DC converter's oscillator in the power supply to trigger interrupts, and use the usual timing based thing. The timing is influenced by the amount of voltage that is on the grid at a particular time, component variations, and thermal noise. Phase noise is real! More importantly, this provides a continuous stream of about 300k deskewed random bits per second, available as long as power is around. Sincerely, Watson Ladd _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography