On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 12:25 AM, Jonathan Lassoff <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Jimmy Hess <[email protected]> wrote: >> On 10/11/12, shawn wilson <[email protected]> wrote: >>> in the past, i've done many different things to create entropy - >>> encode videos, watch youtube, tcpdump -vvv > /dev/null, compiled a >>> kernel. but, what is best? just whatever gets your cpu to peak or are >> >> You are referring to the entropy pool used for /dev/random and >> crypto operations ? >> >> >> You could setup a video capture card or radio tuner card, tune it into >> a good noise source, and arrange for the bit stream to get written >> to /dev/random > > Yes, but then you're also introducing a way for an external attacker > to transmit data that can be mixed into your entropy pool. > > While certainly a cool hack, I don't think anything like this would be > safe for cryptographic use. >
which i guess means my tcpdump is also a bad idea... i've heard of looking at radio, voltage, and video. i was really wondering about a good every day solution - something easily implemented on any computer. so maybe a way of getting random network traffic or something random from computers around you. i'm not verisign or any other type of company that needs to generate thousands of keys in a day, but sometimes i need to generate a half dozen or so, and my entropy runs out pretty quickly. the radio idea might work for me if i could get a wire and a cheap amplifier and plug it into a headphone jack or possibly figure out a ccd type thing on a motor that would give me noise for my sound card. but i was hoping for something even more simple than that - maybe wifi noise?
