[OneRNG-Discuss] Why even use a hardware RNG?

[Jim Cheetham]

This is part of the problem with these things; Linux /dev/random has changed and improved a lot over the last 10 years or so, and it might not make much sense to use that as a positive use-case for any of these devices. General OS security (ASLR etc) needs very little entropy; TLS/SSH/VPN implementations might need more, but you can't get valid entropy estimates out of the kernel any more (and arguably never could anyway).

For Windows, we never really figured out how to introduce entropy to the OS - given that later versions seem to require TPM, I expect they get 100% of their entropy from the PC hardware. Not sure how that scales through VM hypervisors of course.

Then for stats and maths, PRNG is probably better (if you can control the seeding, you can provide reproducibility in your models).

So, what's left? What do people really want to use hardware RNGs for?
-- 
  Jim Cheetham
  jim at cheetham.nz


On Sat, 3 Feb 2024, at 8:06 AM, Ethan Spoelstra wrote:
> I was actually going to mention that one as I've picked up a few, but I've discovered I don't do enough that needs TRNG to actually put them to use.
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