At 6:02 AM 11/2/95, Andrew D. Isaacson wrote:

A thought just occurred to me...

How useful would it be to use a video stream as a source of random input to something like /dev/random? I'm thinking along the lines of a Connectix QuickCam (sp?) or the cool videocam that comes with the Indy. It seems to me that the picture recieved by a camera sitting atop a monitor would be quite unpredictable. (relatively) High bandwith, too. Even if the entropy in a video signal is low, the high bandwidth would seem to make up for it.

Struggling to keep my head above the crypto tide,

Digitized video input, especially from something like a noisy channel (t.v. channel, for example), is quite likely to produce a lot more entropy bits per second than nearly any of us ever need. (One's PGP key could be seeded in a fraction of a millisecond, for example.) The issue is that most people don't need this number of entropy bits per second, and that most people don't have video inputs. (And those that do may not have them hooked up and ready to go.) One of the basic ideas we have had, as Cypherpunks, is to encourage widespread methods. Any methods that need special hardware tend to not get widely used. Audio, video, disk timing, and all sorts of other sources of physical randomness are useful to have, but most people either won't have the right configuration or won't configure their systems so as to use their configuration. --Tim May, who has both audio and video digitizers built into his Power Macintosh 7100av, but notes that none of the crypto programs he uses has any provision for using them, and so he doesn't use them for crypto purposes. Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."