At 10:38 AM 10/17/95, Martin Diehl wrote: ....
I suggest that if you capture the time in microseconds between keystrokes and insert the least significant 8 bits between the corresponding characters (i. e. <letter1> <time2 - time1> <letter2> <time3 - time2> <letter3> ... <letter nnn> <time until double CR - time nnn>) and MD5 the set of values, the resulting "random" value will be different for both people who type different input texts as well as those people who type the same input text.
.... Indeed, but the point of the proposal is a determinate and reproducible program behavior so as to gain confidence that the output is correct by comparing output of several programs. ....
As regards the observation that MD5 produces only a 128 bit result, you could call MD5 after each nn values (at least 16) have been entered. In that way a few lines of input and associated timing values could easily generate a value of the same order of magnitude as the number of 1K primes.
.... Sounds good.