----- Forwarded message from "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> ----- Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 15:22:58 +1000 From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> To: Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@panix.com> Cc: cryptography@randombit.net Subject: Re: [cryptography] Random number generation influenced, HW RNG User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 Reply-To: jamesd@echeque.com On 2013-09-08 1:25 PM, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

...

Access to the raw output would have made it possible to determine that the random numbers were in fact generated by the physical process described, since it is hard and would cost a lot of silicon to simulate the various subtle offwhite characteristics of a well described actual physical process. I am extremely skeptical of this claim.

Intel shows a circuit that should in theory output near random bits. If the bits are actually coming from this circuit, we would expect to see some long term anti correlation - an unusually long stream of zeros should have a higher than random percent chance of being followed by an unusually long stream of ones, and some short term correlation - a zero should have a higher than fifty percent chance of being followed by another zero, and a lower than fifty percent chance of being followed by a one. If we don't see that, we are not getting the raw unwhitened output, or there is no hardware true randomness for us to get. Conversely, if we do see that, we can be pretty sure that the circuit exists and is producing true randomness, though of course we don't know if that true randomness is necessarily being fed into the whitener. But then we don't need to use the output of the whitener, we can feed the off white output into a software whitener. _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5