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On entropy and randomnessOn entropy and randomnessPosted Dec 13, 2007 12:58 UTC (Thu) by brother_rat (subscriber, #1895)In reply to: On entropy and randomness by jimbo Parent article: On entropy and randomness
For the same reason that using things like a MAC address is a bad idea. You really want to be sure the data from /dev/urandom is not only random but secret too. There are services such as http://www.random.org/ that provide really random numbers, but they are aimed at scientific and statistical applications rather than cryptographic uses. Also the original problem relates to randomness available to an installer, where I'm sure the network is unconfigured.
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On entropy and randomness Posted Dec 13, 2007 18:47 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link] What if you had a random.org-like service with a *shared* internet-wide entropy pool, where users could *upload* entropy? Sure there would be griefers uploading continuous streams of non-random data (e.g. 00000000000000000000000000000000000...) to be mixed into the public entropy pool. But isn't the number and actions of an "internet-ful" of griefers also unpredictable (and thus increasing entropy)? :)
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