Randomness is randomness. However, the important thing is that the
randomness is not known, and the randomness cannot be retrieved.
If you're worried about passing the tests on a subset of the data,
take the subset that you're thinking of and run the tests on it. If
it's truly random, it will pass no matter what subset you take.
I don't know what the characteristics of the encrypted stream would
be (to an eavesdropper) if the encrypted stream is completely
random. Theoretically it shouldn't make a difference, but I haven't
heard of any research on the topic. (Most research attempts to apply
a cryptographically-generated sequence of apparently-random bytes to
an information stream, thus making the stream appear random. It /
should/ just appear like any other encrypted information stream.)
-Kyle H
On May 8, 2007, at 12:26 PM, Robert Welz wrote:
Hello!
I have a hardware rng for the parallel port of the pc. The device
( the
rp1 from http://www.true-random.com ) produces a constant stream of
random
bytes at 1 MB/s and it passes the diehard tests as well as some others
mentioned on the website.
My question now is: If I take the stream of data, slicing it into N
chunks
of 500 kB over some kind of ring buffer and send the chunk over the
network to feed N computers /dev/random will that suffice and keep the
entropy so that those tests will still be passed? I am not the
mathematician, we had affine geometry instead of probabilistic
theory at
school ;)
Second question: If I use ssh for the transmission, will that have
influence on the quality of the data; I mean encrypting random data
will
that lower the entropy anyhow?
Thank you for your time,
Robert
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