-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- From: m5@dev.tivoli.com (Mike McNally) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 07:29:01 -0500 I also have some doubts as to the randomness of this; I suspect that the kernel is rather deterministic in its scheduling practices. I don't think that anyone has suggested otherwise. I believe that `clock skew' was the underlying source of randomness that Matt Blaze mentioned in the message where I first saw that code. In any case, a number of people have expressed interest in seeing signs of non-random behavior. As far as I know, no one has said anything if they've found such signs. I've tried to find some, but only with very simple tests. I generated a quarter megabits and found that: - I can only compress it to about 32Kb, i. e. 256 k bits. Tim May has suggested that compressibility is getting to be a good metric for entropy. - It seems to contain roughly equal numbers of: * 0s and 1s * 00s, 01s, 10s, and 11s * etc. I forget how high I checked. - It contains some rather long sequences of 0s and 1s. I think on the order of 20. I have no idea how reasonable it would be to use this approach in Netscape, however if it were available as an option to generate, say 300 bits, I'd personally be plenty willing to let it chew up five minutes while I get my morning caffeine. I realize that some people would not. It certainly couldn't hurt to throw a few bits gathered this way into the mix. Also, it may be possible to get more than one bit of entropy per second using this approach, I was merely showing the code as Matt originally presented it. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMGanppNR+/jb2ZlNAQE2jQQAx1dj/WjMK4XeNr4mZxyW6G9TKL1ZKqOE tkePnuEujXQDxoEy5UNGWo36NG1hn564wprdS5e4aCQwZaPhPOuXZTd9uPEWXdqq j5WyNmzBqmSIlCU+wlEVnBpYWbgxdPC1Lx8ckkxxX07+F3B+ftibrfB+t7ysDDPC LOJ2PCXr/7I= =8lGs -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Rick Busdiecker Please do not send electronic junk mail! net: rfb@lehman.com or rfb@cmu.edu PGP Public Key: 0xDBD9994D www: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/rfb/http/home.html send mail, subject "send index" for mailbot info, "send pgp key" gets my key