Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG [LWN.net]

Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG

Posted Jun 26, 2015 9:24 UTC (Fri) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562)
In reply to: Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG by gerdesj
Parent article: Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG

> Strong crypto is easy if you only just apply a little lateral thought. I don't bother with insecure USB devices for my TRNG: I have hired 10,000 Mechanical Turks to toss coins and I scrape the results straight into the input for my mechturk_entropyd.

If you're indeed talking about the amazon thing, that sounds far easier to influence by some TLA than noise in your soundcard, delays in your hdd positioning, etc.

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Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG

Posted Jun 26, 2015 9:47 UTC (Fri) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (2 responses)

"If you're indeed talking about the amazon thing, that sounds far easier to influence by some TLA than noise in your soundcard, delays in your hdd positioning, etc."

It was a joke and it turns out someone else has already told it and YouTubed it.

My real points were:
* A decent source of entropy still has to travel from the source to the thing that consumes it, via routes that can be compromised
* A source that could create decent entropy may not do so (some of my "Turks" generates far more coin tosses than the rest - perhaps by hitching up a stream cipher)
* Silly ideas like "tweaking" or "augmenting" existing algos are doomed to failure - my DH improvement is rather unlikely to create a usable DH param!

Cheers
Jon

Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG

Posted Jun 26, 2015 9:51 UTC (Fri) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (1 responses)

Ok, I should not have replied before having my first coffee. Good morning.

Randomness with OneRNG and NeuG

Posted Jun 26, 2015 9:54 UTC (Fri) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

"Ok, I should not have replied before having my first coffee. Good morning."

I probably should have spelt out what I meant in the original post - that was way after first glass of wine.