1.7 GBit/s RNG by laser feedback

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:26:22AM -0500, Europus wrote:
> Eugen Leitl wrote:
> >On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 09:26:57AM -0800, Sarad AV wrote:
> >>Is that a better way to generate pseudo random numbers?
> >
> >No, it's a RNG, not PRNG. 1.7 GBit/s is not a huge improvement
> >over RNGs in VIA C7, IIRC.
> 
> On another board, this is being called a PRNG. One point that

No, because this is brownian noise, straight from the quantum floor. 
PRNGs are deterministic discrete systems. Of course you can
whiten a RNG with, say a block cipher like AES.

> is raised, if it was truly an RNG then it wouldn't be necessary
> to mix the outputs from two laser assemblies.

No idea about that. Analog whitening, possibly?