Hi, I'm Brad. We did the "Atom-Age RNG" box. Jim Thompson forwarded your mail regarding his comment about us: >>Here in my hands, I have an "Atom-Age" HW RNG device. > Sounds interesting -- do you have a URL or other contact info? Regarding self-test, no, it's really a simple box. I just wanted to get the numbers right. No whitening, just straight bits. I'm a big fan of raw numbers. I'm completely wigged-out about the concept of performing whitening before a user sees numbers. I understand the desire for self-validation in the box, I just wasn't headed there myself. I've always believed that this sort of thing is best done explicitly by the user. Doing the tests one's self - Doctor's advice even with a "fancy" RNG - this is NOT MEANT as a catty remark, but I REALLY THINK this is important. (you didn't trust us, did you? :-) Rhetorically, what's the point of testing your RNG at power-up? Either the circuit is good or it's bad. Who's to say that a circuit that can't be trusted to start-up and spit-out good random numbers won't start spitting-out bad numbers during normal operation? I'd much prefer to have the host checking the numbers as a matter of normal operation. I'm not too thrilled about expecting the RNG to check itself, in any situation. About the only thing that hoses up the numbers in my box is low batteries. For that reason, I put hardware in the box to constantly monitor the three separate & isolated power supplies. The uP shuts things down if any of the power supplies go too low. Personally, I've gotten so used to the way it works (I've been using it for more than three years) that I just don't worry about the numbers on my own box much any more. I've run this thing through muck and mire, finding that if the micro hasn't shut things down because of a power supply problem, the numbers are going to be good. If someone can put together a streaming test for up on the host computer (*nix and/or 9X/NT) and would be kind enough to provide source code, I'd be highly gratified, and thankful. I would of course gladly send it along with the boxes as a way of helping out those who don't want to worry about or think too much about this issue. All our uP does is collect the bits and run an RS-232 port. Plus a little bit of housekeeping. You get the uP source code & it's documented (imagine that). Worried? Careful? Buy the $99.00 microprocessor development kit from Motorola, scan in the text, audit it, reassemble it & burn a new uP. We chose the uP and even socketed the uP for that exact reason (the kit includes an assembler, a programmer and a blank uP!). The board comes with schematics. There's even a breadboarding area for experimentation. Want to play with high-dollar noise diodes? Change the amplifiers? It couldn't be easier, get out a soldering iron. A few other nice features. Big steel box. Thick steel. Dangerous in flight. This is a labor of love and you're welcomed to join in. I do keep a few dozen or so in stock and they're easy to build: custom steel CNC box fabrication, volume manufacturing on line, etc. If I needed to, I could and gladly would make them in the thousands. Thank goodness, though, it's been fun to do. Especially since the odds of making back even the development costs are 10e6-to-1. Essentially, I wanted to answer the question: "If it's so easy to do this with just a diode, why doesn't anybody make a cheap box that does that?" Unfortunately, it took me about two solid months of engineering work to provide the answer, being that it takes a lot of focused effort to get a reproduceable circuit with numbers that are really good and to get that circuit into a form ready for volume production. Add to that the distinct possibility that I'll only sell a few! What the heck, it's only a $200 box. Big deal. But, I've found that it's really a fine little box for what it is. I do sincerely appreciate your interest. Best regards, Brad Martin NSCD LLP P.S. Atom-Age is a small company we run on the side. You can get more information on who we are by going to our REAL company's web site, at: www.nshore.com. P.S.S. Of course, I'm sure that a lot of the people using the Intel stuff will check their numbers, too - no matter how good they say they are - but that's the kind of guys we are :-). If they're good numbers, I think that (in general term) the work by Intel is a very good thing to have happened. - b. P.S.S.S. I hope the Intel RNG isn't a pseudo RNG hash of the PID ;-) - b.
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