Peter Thomas wrote: > I've read about special hardware devices that (claim to) give true > random numbers, some based on thermodynamics some even on quantum > mechanics.
True randomness exists in nature, but so far we're unable to detect it. (Seriously.) Imagine you have a Geiger counter and a radioactive sample. Over each time frame, the Geiger counter reports how many decays it measures. That number becomes your random value. So far, so random, right? But a Geiger counter has a reset time. Once it clicks, there's a small time window in which it's unable to detect new decay events. This has the effect of introducing a bias into your random number generator: some decay events will be transformed into non-events. There are some tricks of physics and mathematics you can use to get very high quality values out of this kind of radioisotope setup, but the basic problem remains: even when measuring a totally nondeterministic event, determinism in the detection mechanism will undercut you. You can get really, really close to truly random numbers, but you can't get there. > Are there any supported in Linux and would > it make sense or is it even possible to use them with gnupg? Linux has support for some hardware RNGs, yes. I don't know offhand which ones. OpenBSD apparently has support for a lot of them. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
