<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 1:34 AM, Amos Shapira <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:amos.shapira@gmail.com" target="_blank">amos.shapira@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr"><div>If someone is really concerned about NSA knowing their random seed through Intel's hardware implementation - can't these few people add hardware RNG's to their sources?<br></div>(one ref: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_hardware_random_number_generators" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_hardware_random_number_generators</a>)<br>
</div></blockquote><div><br>To make it clear: I, for one, am not concerned that NSA will know the seed of an RNG at any given time. Nor do I think this is an attack vector they normally consider. I am concerned that someone (possibly less well equipped than NSA) may exploit the lack of randomness in an RNG and wouldn't need to know the seed at all. <br>
<br>Why would anyone be interested? In your personal laptop, quite possibly no one (depends on how naughty you are and whom did you piss off). In your work laptop - depends on what you do for a living. In a bank's server that you may administer or run your software on - maybe quite a few resourceful people. And so on.<br>
</div></div><br>As as Nadav quite properly mentioned other uses of RNGs (e.g., Monte Carlo and other simulations), do you really want the investment house that manages your savings to systematically misprice securities? Just as an example...<br>
<br>-- <br>Oleg Goldshmidt | <a href="mailto:pub@goldshmidt.org" target="_blank">pub@goldshmidt.org</a>
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