On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 4:48 AM, John Rose via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > Conveniently there is now a random number generator built into Intel CPU's: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand I wonder what the quality of that is?
It uses thermal noise passed through a cryptographic hash function. It ought to be safe. Yet there is lingering doubt due to the NSA's attempt to plant backdoors in NIST crypto standards and bribe RSA Security $10 million to put the backdoor in their crypto software. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG If you are paranoid (could the NSA have bribed Intel too?), then I suggest mixing RDRAND output with other entropy sources through another hash, like BSD already does with /dev/random. I guess this is AGI related in that peers in a distributed system need a secure way to authenticate each other to prevent spammers from injecting forged messages. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
