From: Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>
Some simplifications I might suggest:
For a dedicated random number generator with low bandwidth, there's not much reason for variable baud rate. I'd use a fixed baud rate of, say 1200, or even 300.
I strongly disagree -- you really want to be able to do as high a bandwidth as possible. You might think we don't need one time pads ever anymore, but they are still the one and only provably absolutely secure method out there -- thus, sources of large numbers of random bits are going to be of use.
When switched on, and a "cr" (or some other character) is sent to it, random bytes will stream out continiously.
I'd just make the thing spew continuously. It's not like you're losing real, er, information if you ignore a few random bits. This way you don't need the added circuitry for switching on and off.
Bad idea. If I hooked it up to my workstation, I'd end up spending lots of CPU on the thing and possibly get nasty problems with buffers filling. Not everything on earth is a PC that will ignore the interrupts if the port isn't in use, you know. Perry