Re: How much entropy in a key press?

Shannon estimates roughly 1 bit per character of English. RFC 1750 D. Eastlake, S. Crocker, J. Schiller, "Randomness Recommendations for Security" is probably useful. Adam | Can anyone tell me how many bits of entropy there are per 7-bit ASCII | character. More specifically, a program wishes to generate a session | key by prompting the user to type N random key presses. The characters | entered are hashed down to 128 bits by MD5 for subsequent use as a key. | | What should the value of N be, such that the entropy of the user's | string does not unnecessarily exceed the entropy of the hash? | | -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume