From: "Rev. Mark Grant" <mark@unicorn.com>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 95 08:40:32 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: One-Time-Pad generation from audio device
Message-ID: <Pine.3.89.9510021627.A14466-0100000@unicorn.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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).

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. 

	Mark