Good random seeds
Since we can all see how badly time works, I'd like to point out that Will Price, author of the excellent Cryptdisk utility for the Mac, uses mouse movements to seed his PRNG. His code is available for a small fee, and I'd strongly suggest that people who need good, easy PRNs take a look at it, and also take a long look at RFC1750, randomness reccomendations for security (or something like that.) Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume
Adam Shostack writes:
Since we can all see how badly time works, I'd like to point out that Will Price, author of the excellent Cryptdisk utility for the Mac, uses mouse movements to seed his PRNG.
His code is available for a small fee, and I'd strongly suggest that people who need good, easy PRNs take a look at it, and also take a
Just to clear up a point of attribution, the core random number generator used by CryptDisk was designed and written by Colin Plumb, with a wrapper for the Macintosh written by me. Will (Price) told me that he has made some improvements to my original implementation for the latest version of CryptDisk, doing the clock timings more simply. My code and Colin's are free, and I'd be happy to post the routines if there is interest. -- Will
participants (2)
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Adam Shostack -
W. Kinney