Entry

What's the best way to obtain seeds for random number generators?

May 12th, 2000 07:02
unknown unknown, Fredrik Lundh, Mike Steed, Ivan Van Laningham, Will Ware, Paul Jackson

RFC 1750 provides a whole lot of information on this topic:

    http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1750.html

   "Computer clocks, or similar operating system or hardware values,
   provide significantly fewer real bits of unpredictability than might
   appear from their specifications."

Depending on how serious you are about randomness, you may want to use a
hardware source (e.g., an audio input device).  See 8.7 in the following
document:

   http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cryptography-faq/part08/

Also, under linux, see /dev/random.  random.c claims:
 * This routine gathers environmental noise from device drivers, etc.,
 * and returns good random numbers, suitable for cryptographic use.

Will Ware wrote:

If you really need a lot of randomness, and you don't mind spending
an evening or two with a soldering iron, I once made up a pretty
good random bit generator circuit, described at:
http://world.std.com/~wware/hw-rng.html

You can bring the bits in one of the pins of your printer port. I
have some information about a Linux device driver for the thing, if
you're interested in pursuing it, that was developed by some students
who recently used the circuit for a course project.

-----------------

A Random Number web site from SGI is:

    http://lavarand.sgi.com/