Re: Spinners and compression functions

JonWienke@aol.com writes:

Since there has been a lot of discussion about spinners derived from various things (idle loops, video retrace, etc.) used as entropy sources, here is yet another idea. Run the spinner output through a PKZip type compression function, and then seed a PRNG with the output from that. This would provide a means of gauging the amount of entropy that has been fed into the PRNG, (count the bytes output from the compression function)

Actually, it doesn't. The entropy present from a reasonable source like keyclick timings is much much lower than the output of pkzip is going to suggest to you. Perry