Aloha! Damien Miller wrote: > On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, James A. Donald wrote: > >> If one uses a higher resolution counter - sub >> microsecond - and times multiple disk accesses, one gets >> true physical randomness, since disk access times are >> effected by turbulence, which is physically true >> random. > > Until someone runs your software on a SSD instead of a HDD. Oops.
That is a very good observation. I would bet loads of GM stocks that very few people realise that moving from 0ld sk00l HDD to SSD would affect their entropy sources. Does anybode have any idea if this has been discussed among OS Dev groups? One could probably do a similar comparison to the increasingly popular idea of building virtual LANs to connect your virtualized server running on the same physical host. Ethernet frame reception time variance as well as other real physical events should take a hit when moving into the virtualization domain. After all, replacing physical stuff with SW is the whole point of virtualization. Does anybody know what VMware, Parallels etc do to support entropy for sources like this, or is it basically a forgotten/skipped/ignored feature? -- Med vänlig hälsning, Yours Joachim Strömbergson - Alltid i harmonisk svängning. ======================================================================== Kryptoblog - IT-säkerhet på svenska http://www.strombergson.com/kryptoblog ======================================================================== --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [email protected]
