Soundcard shenanigans

[Anton Vredegoor]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 10:55:08 -0500, Bryan <bryan at eevolved.com> wrote:

>I'm still searching for exotic ways of collecting entropy for cryptographic 
>purposes. One idea consists of sampling the sound card. Does a python 

Another idea (one that I am currently working on) is to sample a
picture from a tvcard. First tune to a frequency that's giving white
noise then sample the picture. If you are using windows you could use
an extension called "VideoCapture-0.5" for that. 

I have the impression white noise on a tvscreen is caused by cosmic
radiation from space, so if that's true it would be hard to predict. 

At the moment I can sample from the card but I have not yet solved the
problem of tuning the frequency, so that has to be scripted or set
using another program, which is not quite what I want. 

Some other idea I have investigated is to write an extension to use a
hardware random number generator that was on the mb of one of my pc's.
This worked very good for some time, and I used some XMLRPC-like
scripts to make this computer the entropy provider for my network, but
later on I got second thoughts, mainly because I wanted to distribute
a bridge-dealing program based on this source of entropy.

It was dependent on having too specific hardware and there were also
problems with distributing some closed source header files. On the
other hand sound cards and even tvcards are much more common.

So I went on to look for other options. Again if you are using
windows, look for a program called 'dscaler' on sourceforge to get
some ideas about programming a tvcard. I believe there's also a lot of
code for programming the BT8x8-chip -used in many tvcards- available
for unixlike operating systems.

Anton.

p.s. My motivation for looking for true random number generators is
John von Neumann's idea that anyone that is using pseudo random number
generators to generate random numbers is "living in a state of sin".