Curious RNG stalemate [was: use of cpunks]

[James A. Donald]

On 2013-10-18 06:45, Bill Stewart wrote:
> Another important kind of hardware where that doesn't work are
> home routers, because the market price of $29-99 can't support much
> extra money for randomness hardware; if it's not in the ARM core
> or whatever other low-power cheap CPU, then it's only going to be
> able to extract entropy from timing and network traffic,

If each router gets a secret unique 128 bit random number at software 
install time, this, plus the boot up time, suffices.

After the router has been running a while, it gathers more randomness 
from network events, but a secret plus the boot up time will suffice at 
first.

And if the router is too cheap to have a clock, so does not know the 
boot up time, well, pretty early in its interactions with its 
environment, it will be asking the time from some system that does have 
a clock, at which point it does have enough randomness.