DIY RNGs [was: Re: Curious RNG stalemate [was: use of cpunks]]

[Krisztián Pintér]

Andy Isaacson (at Tuesday, October 22, 2013, 8:27:16 PM):

>> https://github.com/krisztianpinter/rnd_wavein
> It seems that rnd_wavein uses a small window (you document 256 samples
> as the default).  One common silent-failure mode of video capture
> interfaces is to intermittently provide the same frame (around 1 MiB of
> data) twice!
> If your whitener doesn't chain blocks and you use the output directly as

that is interesting, but does not hurt my tool too much, because my
whitener does chain blocks. i use a keccak sponge that is never
cleared or reset. even if you feed it with all zeros, the output is
indistinguishable from random for a very long time.

> It would be much better to implement a multi-stage entropy pool design

certainly, but such tools have their purpose. for example a online
lotteries might want to have high throughput random number generator.
if you really feed some visual noise to a camera, the entropy
production can even be multiple megabytes per second. it dwarfs any
randomness harnessed from a regular desktop.