Appropriate sources of entropy [LWN.net]

Appropriate sources of entropy

Posted May 24, 2008 17:51 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
Parent article: Appropriate sources of entropy

Another source is from hardware random number generators.

Where does a hardware RNG get its entropy?

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Appropriate sources of entropy

Posted May 26, 2008 5:42 UTC (Mon) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (1 responses)

Johnson noise and other crap like that. Usually it's not really totally uniformly random, but still quite unpredictable :)

Appropriate sources of entropy

Posted May 30, 2008 22:16 UTC (Fri) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

Search for "randomness extractor" for information on turning an unknown 
random distribution into a known one.  It's quite difficult, but often 
possible.  Cool combinatorics at work, and also closely related to error 
correcting codes and hashing.  (They're all related by the concept of 
distance between and distinguishability of the sampled points.)