If someone is really concerned about NSA knowing their random seed through Intel's hardware implementation - can't these few people add hardware RNG's to their sources? (one ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_hardware_random_number_generators )
On 3 January 2013 11:42, Oleg Goldshmidt <p...@goldshmidt.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Nadav Har'El <n...@math.technion.ac.il> > wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 03, 2013, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote about "RNG (was: Re: SSD > drives)": > >> RDRAND is also a PRNG, reseeded at most once every 1022 calls, way > >> faster than /dev/urandom (they state 500MiB per second), and you do not > >> have its source code... > > > > Can anyone give me an example of why on earth anyone would need a > > very high throughput random number generator? > > > > I can understand why things like monte-carlo simulations and ray tracing > > might need a lot of random numbers, but for them PRNG in the program > > (e.g., rand(3)) is perfectly fine > > It is absolutely lousy for any serious simulation work - it is > absolutely not random, and I know for a fact that in a serious Monte > Carlo it will give you wrong results where a good PRNG will give you > correct ones. In the past I tested many PRNGs on problems I knew the > answer for. The vast majority were rubbish. Those that were very > random (it was before NIST, so I relied on DIEHARD) gave good results. > > Actually, what is needed for simulations is uniform coverage of the > state space, not randomness, which is why low-discrepancy (a.k.a. > quasi-random) numbers work. Lousy PRNGs are not uniformly distributed > (when you plot them the problem can often be seen by the naked eye). > It leads to both lousy simulation results and weak cryptographic > properties. Suitability for simulations does not mean strong > cryptography. > > > for any of these super-duper super-secure generators in the kernel or > the CPU... > > It has to be very random. It has been demonstrated many times how easy > it is to exploit a not very random kernel RNG (guess TCP sequence > numbers and so on). Microsoft: looking at you. > > -- > Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il > -- [image: View my profile on LinkedIn] <http://www.linkedin.com/in/gliderflyer>
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