Von Neumann counseled Shannon to call it entropy because "no one really knows what entropy is". ;-)
I wanted to say that it's inherently problematic to use things like the "randomness" in the interarrival time of events like interrupts, etc. to "gather" "entropy" -- Ted has touched on this with his comment on solid state disk drives, etc. A bit stream may have 1 bit of entropy per bit of message (i.e. an entropy of 1), and therefore be incompressible -- perhaps what Schwartz thinks he means when he says "truly random" -- and be entirely predictable. We want nicely-distributed "random" numbers without apparent bias, with an apparent entropy of one, so that 10 bits of key material is really 10 bits of key; what makes such numbers cryptographically useful is that no amount of collected material enables us to predict bits anywhere else in the stream (past or future, if viewed temporally). I have given Herr Schwartz enough of my grossmutterlich Freundlichkeit for one day. Ppppt. - M ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
