FPGA

[Charles Steinkuehler]

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Monty J. Harder wrote:
> Hell, that right there would be a great generator for randomness.  Subtract
> your ideal sine wave from the actual waveform of the AC coming into the
> machine and use the least-significant bits/trits/quits of it.  I wonder what
> it takes to build a chip for that and tie it to the inside of the power
> supply where it's not easily tampered with.  I'd need something else for
> this laptop though.  A USB cable that runs over to the AC side of the brick,
> where the waveform monitoring chip would do its work, and a daemon to take
> the randomness produced by that chip and accumulate it in a file for later
> use when I'm on battery power.

The problem is, the 'noise' can be polluted by external forces (ie: the
men with black hats who want to read all your files).

The commercial products that generate randomness (yes, they do exist)
typically use something like thermal noise (or some other random
physical phenomena) and are (hopefully) carefully designed to avoid
introducing bias or otherwise polluting the random data:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator

- --
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
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