Hello cypherpunks (first post): In the hopes of starting an cryptograpy-related thread... I have been reading the section in _Applied Cryptography_ about random number generators, and some proposed hardware random number generators. It seems to me that with the CD-ROM drive becoming increasingly common these days, this could be exploited as a source of randomness. For example: [1] Read a pseudo-random section from the CD-ROM. Unless you catch the blank end of a sector, you should obtain random data (this is one obvious problem with this method). [2] Read a pseudo-random section from the CD-ROM, and use this data to select another chunk of data from the CD-ROM (more random, yet we still have a problem if we read the blank end of a sector...). The two above ideas are okay, but they both suffer from the same problem, namely if you read the unused portions of the cluster you will get a random sample of all 0's. Not good. The idea that really interests me is this: Place an *audio* CD in the CD-ROM drive. Most CD-ROM drives know about audio discs now, and I believe they can be made to read the binary waveform data even if they don't understand the Red Book audio format. If you have something really random/discordant (Ministry / NIN / Curve / Sonic Youth / Pain Teens / Diamanda Galas / Coil / etc) and you take samples of the waveform and play with them as described in _AC_, you could get some pretty random samples. Of course, care must be taken to only read within the portions of the CD/CD-ROM that have actually been encoded.... What do you all think? I have code to work with CD-ROM drives, works on my system and a friend's CD-ROM drive as well (for DOS machines). I don't know about Mac / UNIX CD-ROM drive programming, sorry. =( I welcome all comments, criticisms, flames, love letters, etc. Post if there's wide enough appeal, or just email me. [ I am also taking suggestions for random / discordant / loud music to use with this method. Please email me, don't post, as I'm sure the rest of the list would dislike us discussing that in public ] -- ========================================================================== | Michael Brandt Handler | <grendel@netaxs.com> | Philadelphia, PA | ==========================================================================