Intel to also add RNG

[Peter Gutmann]

Ben Laurie <benl at google.com> writes:
>On 2 July 2010 13:19, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>>
>>http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=25670&channel=Briefings&section=Microprocessors
>>
>>Tuesday, June 29, 2010
>>
>>Nanoscale Random Number Circuit to Secure Future Chips
>>
>>Intel unveils a circuit that can pump out truly random numbers at high speed.
>
>Have they forgotten the enormous amount of suspicion last time they tried this?

You mean rampant paranoia from a small group of people... if you are genuinely
worried about this, just use it as another input to mix into your entropy pool
(which you should be doing anyway, never trust a single source of entropy).
I'd be quite happy to use the RNG on a Loongson CPU (if there was one) in this
manner, let alone an Intel CPU.

What killed it wasn't paranoia about Intel but their almost total lack of
interest in supporting it once the initial media attention waned.  This
doesn't look any different, note that it's not saying "This will be in Core2's
starting August" but "We've done this in the lab".

Peter.