From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 20:02:01 +0800
To: Jerry Whiting <jwhiting@igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: PRNG in VB
Message-ID: <199602212243.OAA13710@ix15.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 10:05 PM 2/20/96 -0800, you wrote:
>I am answering the courteous inquiry from Thomas Womack about my request for 
>help with a Visual Basic-only PRNG.  The premise is that those who will not or
>can not afford hardware-based RNG's need something relatively secure in the
>face of nothing at all or at best a lesser implementation.
...
>the getcurrenttime() Win API a lot.  Said to have 50 millicent increments.

The ViaCrypt PGP has a nice feature that pops up a window for you to wave your
mouse around in or type random characters if you'd rather.  It's _much_ nicer,
and generally faster, to wave the mouse.  If you need a few bits of
randomness when you're putting up the splash screen, you could also watch the 
mouse any time it's in your window on the way to the "ok" button,
though of course that doesn't help if your users are using the Enter or Esc key
instead of the mouse.


Of course, if you're trying to do crypto processing, you probably also feed
the data into MD5 before using any of it.

#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com / billstewart@attmail.com +1-415-442-2215
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs     Pager +1-408-787-1281

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