At 01:34 3/29/96, Deranged Mutant wrote:
- Is this apparent entropy really *unpredictable* (the most useful definition of "random" for cryptographic purposes)?
Good question. You'd need to look for patterns. Barring none, you'd have to guess the factors that lead to the entropy, and then see if there's a way to reverse-engineer it. (Perhaps use a stripped down system and build it up, or disable some of the hardware and OS features etc.)
There's more to unpredictability than patterns or their absense. In addition, you have to look at the ability of anyone else on the same machine to learn things about the data you're gathering and subtract the entropy of that commonly available data. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme@cybercash.com http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |CyberCash, Inc., Suite 430 http://www.cybercash.com/ | |2100 Reston Parkway PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 | |Reston, VA 22091 Tel: (703) 620-4200 | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+