[onerng talk] RNG designs

[Paul Campbell]

On Sun, 02 Feb 2014 21:49:51 Jim Cheetham wrote:

> But even if the RF stream delivers less than 1 bit of entropy per bit,
> that doesn't really hurt us. It is still better than zero :-)
> 
> If the diode circuit delivers a better result, is it really 'perfect'?

arguably yes  - the avalanches in the diode are triggered by quantum effects 
.... it's the sampling of the resulting data that introduces the slight 1/0 
difference 

I think the main reasons for having multiple sources are more paranoia that 
one of them might have be mucked with by a 3rd party than that two is 
inherently better than one 


> From reading of the Turbid documentation
> (http://www.av8n.com/turbid/paper/turbid.htm#sec-hrng starts half-way
> through) the hashing stage is what mitigates problems in the input. I
> don't see that mixing all the sources into a single pool
> (interleaving, xor-ing; does it matter which?) and then hashing them
> before presenting them to the user can be a problem.

I don;t think it is - but as Ian points out transparency is important since 
that's our major goal here

> Our default firmware should be the most useful, but not necessarily
> the most flexible. People who want flexibility should be able to get
> the programmer and play with alternative firmwares, or preferably
> write their own.

yup

	Paul