USB Block Erupters as RNG sources?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Curious; anyone know much about what these inexpensive (comparatively, price seems steadily falling) ASIC Block Erupter USB Bitcoin miners can be adapted to doing? Could they be repurposed as RNG sources? I know they are designed / programmed for running the SHA256 hashing employed in mining Bitcoin, but as the difficulty rate goes up, their value in that arena becomes less and less... Just wondering if they might find new life as inexpensive RNGs. Any pointers to the circuit or the code they run? Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is even remotely a valid or good idea... But a cheap hardware thumb drive RNG might be useful, no? DN - -- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (MingW32) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJSTTxSAAoJEDMbeBxcUNAeS6cH/2byF7EcXWk6/wFrAzTkNuWE AuL8VEdgPuhZwkN10JCrFcpk7AwwIWZfZq7gUkFaaWS/Zc/X3Fiwj6no/Sr+76ak ste9aIZJ7ZGA6Hkni7JXdvEZi/xyq40UyVl0RGJHCTOrtNirSwgGF5uE8h0WYgom LwrulVWE+QpblBgVWJ/vR8i18kWnK1skrOGwDBg9weqW3nmBRtye3bOcJipiYHXm qdkxrzAYCY6Odr2pI7Fiv1lM4lH9ryZyDbJ6VW3jmsq2sXBMZ/TfZugscjx78m39 AbIk87ubwNUj30B/36pIvQyA9ePX43JZ9Ojpy+y3McbHI0Zg65A+MNpLnLCenCc= =7P4e -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 2:43 AM, d.nix <d.nix@comcast.net> wrote:
... Curious; anyone know much about what these inexpensive (comparatively, price seems steadily falling) ASIC Block Erupter USB Bitcoin miners can be adapted to doing? Could they be repurposed as RNG sources?
at best you *might* be able twist it into a DRBG that would still need to be seeded (and regularly reseeded) with robust entropy. these ASICs really are single purpose; they're useless for anything else.
d.nix <d.nix@comcast.net> writes:
Curious; anyone know much about what these inexpensive (comparatively, price seems steadily falling) ASIC Block Erupter USB Bitcoin miners can be adapted to doing? Could they be repurposed as RNG sources?
"Very little", and "no". They're basically custom Bitcoin-mining ASICs, I looked at one a while back for use in password-cracking and they're really not suited for it at all, you load a vector in and say "go" but since they're quite I/O-limited you can't easily adapt them for hash-breaking. As for RNG use, they're entirely deterministic, how would you use them as an RNG source? Peter.
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"Very little", and "no". They're basically custom Bitcoin-mining ASICs, I looked at one a while back for use in password-cracking and they're really not suited for it at all, you load a vector in and say "go" but since they're quite I/O-limited you can't easily adapt them for hash-breaking. As for RNG use, they're entirely deterministic, how would you use them as an RNG source?
at best you *might* be able twist it into a DRBG that would still need to be seeded (and regularly reseeded) with robust entropy.
these ASICs really are single purpose; they're useless for anything else.
Thanks Peter, Coderman- Kinda what I suspected seeing as they are *Application Specific* IC's after all... Wishful thinking more than anything knowing that they are now saturating their market and loosing value rapidly. Cheers! DN - -- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (MingW32) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJSTZc/AAoJEDMbeBxcUNAen9AH/3e6uZXS0ot0k8OgSfhVnPQ/ kNhhkgS+xZEx3w7k5pBnw5SXxz4wnZ4pWi9+/16FLoryy5Jtped9GA8J/5iyU/84 RU8m1Uskb0fwqMX1U67EiV7jOhJnzCRpCc/0Vy7JwF1q06VRRgFHLOLVq9MEJuqc k7XyeCZRlvXflMjN9tB40xwq7hntBt+CqSdja9wAdzEIfRffiqkuNO02nSYVrtkC BV/UomkBtBed4lxXp/EmEA1WPt7hmsX6o+dJYDgvRi61RslADdy0Ye++A4iJRbYM qo2MS0PhvnZb7Tu59GjwlGT2GxFEXOADaK6Atq6zI6S33pb1OwuuFlxdhmjPEFU= =WXON -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (3)
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coderman -
d.nix -
Peter Gutmann