From: pmetzger@shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger)
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 92 08:47:10 PST
To: hughes@soda.berkeley.edu
Subject: Rander box
In-Reply-To: <9211130920.AA27066@soda.berkeley.edu>
Message-ID: <9211131639.AA23711@newsu.shearson.com>
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>From: Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>

>Some simplifications I might suggest:

>For a dedicated random number generator with low bandwidth, there's
>not much reason for variable baud rate.  I'd use a fixed baud rate of,
>say 1200, or even 300.

I strongly disagree -- you really want to be able to do as high a
bandwidth as possible. You might think we don't need one time pads
ever anymore, but they are still the one and only provably absolutely
secure method out there -- thus, sources of large numbers of random
bits are going to be of use.

>>   When switched on,   and a "cr" (or some other character) is sent to it,
>>random bytes will stream out continiously.   

>I'd just make the thing spew continuously.  It's not like you're
>losing real, er, information if you ignore a few random bits.  This
>way you don't need the added circuitry for switching on and off.

Bad idea. If I hooked it up to my workstation, I'd end up spending
lots of CPU on the thing and possibly get nasty problems with buffers
filling. Not everything on earth is a PC that will ignore the
interrupts if the port isn't in use, you know.

Perry