From: Yih-Chun Hu <yihchun@u.washington.edu>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 95 14:22:16 PDT
To: "Rev. Mark Grant" <mark@unicorn.com>
Subject: Re: One-Time-Pad generation from audio device
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9510021627.A14466-0100000@unicorn.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.3.91j.951002141954.21670A-100000@saul1.u.washington.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Mon, 2 Oct 1995, Rev. Mark Grant wrote:

> 
> Over the weekend I hacked up a one-time-pad generator from the random 
> number code I've been writing for Privtool, which uses noise from the 
> audio device to generate random numbers.
> 
> The code basically reads in a 512-byte block from /dev/audio, then takes
> the MD5 of that block to generate 16 bytes of the OTP. The raw audio data
> I'm getting is not particularly random and will compress by 3:1 using gzip
> or compress, so I'm assuming that using a 32:1 ratio here via MD5 will
> give a truly random output (it's certainly uncompressible).

I wouldn't bet on it. I did a similar hack with perl, with a much more
conservative 5 seconds to 32 bytes. That didn't cut it, when I ent'ed the
result it gave 6 bits of entropy / 8 bits of output.
I do recall posting it here.

> 
> Before I release the source code to the Net, can anyone give me any good
> reasons to believe that this won't produce physically random output, or
> make suggestions on how to test, or improve, the generated output ? There's
> a #define which can be used to easily increase the amount of data fed into
> the MD5, but at the moment it will only generate about 1 MB per hour on a
> Sparcstation (limited by the audio input rate), so I don't want to
> increase that if I don't have to. 

Um.. I would try to generate bits quickly, then securely, so for example
you get a 2k buffer and do it 5 sec / 128 bits. Then slow down and overwrite
the buffer and give warnings if the user wants to use the bits too early.

> 
> 	Mark
> 
> 
> 

+---- Yih-Chun Hu (finger:yihchun@cs.washington.edu) ----------------------+
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