SSD drives

[Nadav Har'El]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2013, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote about "Re: SSD drives":
> 2) I would not only be worried about an NSA backdoor in Intel CPUs,
> but also about the degree of randomness of their generator. If it is
> flawed (and it is notoriously difficult to do a really good PRNG - I
> assume it is a PRNG, otherwise Ted would not be worried about NSA
> backdoor)

The whole point of the hardware random number generator is that it is
*not* a PRNG, but rather some special hardware which supposedly uses
sources of randomness (e.g., heat) not normally available for software.

Doing a normal PRNG in hardware instead of software would be kind of
pointless - what could it possibly gain you - improved performance of
the PRNG? Hardly nobody cares about that.

Anyway, what Ted Tso was "worried" about was that theoretically, the
output of the random number generator *might* be a PRNG returning a
sequence known to the NSA (or Intel), and there is no way to verify
that this is not the case.

In any case, I think what a normal user should do is to use
/dev/urandom - and that should (but I don't know if it does) use both
the hardware and software sources of randomness, as available.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Thursday, Jan 3 2013, 21 Tevet 5773
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |we will type five times as much as we read