From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 04:42:57 +0800
To: JonWienke@aol.com
Subject: Re: Spinners and compression functions
In-Reply-To: <960405210713_185610686@emout10.mail.aol.com>
Message-ID: <199604061626.LAA07799@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



JonWienke@aol.com writes:
> Since there has been a lot of discussion about spinners derived from various
> things (idle loops, video retrace, etc.) used as entropy sources, here is yet
> another idea.  Run the spinner output through a PKZip type compression
> function, and then seed a PRNG with the output from that.  This would provide
> a means of gauging the amount of entropy that has been fed into the PRNG,
> (count the bytes output from the compression function)

Actually, it doesn't. The entropy present from a reasonable source
like keyclick timings is much much lower than the output of pkzip is
going to suggest to you.

Perry