Hardware random number generator

ogogon said:
I believe that your salaries there have either increased significantly, or Boeings have become much cheaper...
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I think the latter. You can get plane parts for free these days (or so I was told).
 
Assuming you have enough of a driver to read from your hardware random number device, could it be as simple as starting a task early on that uses dd to copy from the device to /dev/random? I'm a little shaky on the details of FreeBSD I/O yet, so this may be crazy, but it would seem like the write would block with FreeBSD didn't want any more entropy, and the read would block when the hardware device didn't have any more to give at the moment.
 
External hardware generators are snake oil imo. The only real need for a hardware generator is in some, mostly old, embedded, systems. None of these cases justify an external generator.
 
bob2112 I sincerely hope that all the foolish villains of this world accept your advice without verification and completely uncritically.

I congratulate you on this low-quality contribution.
 
Decades ago, Byte magazine had an article on building a noise generator that fed into a computer for giving a random number. Someone can search for that. Probably before 2000 but not sure.
Another article I read where the time it took between keypresses for someone on the keyboard
 
This project is available https://www.crowdsupply.com/leetronics/infinite-noise-trng
and supposedly has open source software which works on FreeBSD https://www.crowdsupply.com/13-37/i.../free-entropy-service-libinfnoise-and-openssl
github.com

FreeBSD and macOS support · Issue #8 · leetronics/infnoise

Is there any plan to support FreeBSD or macOS? FYI, I've removed the Linux-dependent part and fix the Makefile for the FreeBSD libraries and the code seems to be working fine for FreeBSD 11.2-STABL...
github.com github.com
but it looks like work has stopped
github.com

GitHub - jj1bdx/infnoise-freebsd: Infinity Noise TRNG Program for FreeBSD

Infinity Noise TRNG Program for FreeBSD. Contribute to jj1bdx/infnoise-freebsd development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com
github.com

GitHub - jj1bdx/freebsd-dev-trng: An entropy injection device driver for FreeBSD

An entropy injection device driver for FreeBSD. Contribute to jj1bdx/freebsd-dev-trng development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com
 
I think that for all but the most esoteric applications, an entropy gathering system that can be used to seed a high-end PRNG is adequate. ie collect operating system "noise" and use it to seed mersenne-twister with long period...and use that entropy to reseed the PRNG frequently. That would foil attempts to determine the sequence starting point. I mean the twister has an astronomically long recycle period that makes it relatively secure.

I hate referring to Linux, but their /dev/random entropy system does quite nicely...and if that isn't good enough then the diode avalanche breakdown is good for generating entropy, and some Intel motherboards even embedded such devices for that purpose.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Decades ago, Byte magazine had an article on building a noise generator that fed into a computer for giving a random number. Someone can search for that. Probably before 2000 but not sure.
Another article I read where the time it took between keypresses for someone on the keyboard
Click to expand...
Keyboard and mouse interrupt data is part of the Linux /dev/random entropy generation.
 
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