Saturday, September 08, 2018

Totally Random


It's here.
As far as computing goes this has to be one of the most exciting days of my life.
That's a big statement, let me explain.
Ever since I got the encryption bug, the one thing that has been the most difficult to deal with is the creation of entropy within any kind of computing equipment I own. There are plenty of ways of doing this like flipping a coin or rolling dice but they're all too time consuming when you need to test new methods. There is also crypto secure pseudo random number generation which is great for making sure stuff works, but what about putting methods into practice? There never has been nor will there be a replacement for true random.
The USB device above from OneRNG and is an:
...avalanche diode circuit and optionally an RF circuit, whitened and presented over a USB/Serial connection.
This will feed a computer's entropy pool to stop the PC from grinding to a halt trying to create entropy by itself.

As I mentioned in my previous post this will be attached to a Raspberry Pi with a thermal printer. My aim is to use the RPi as an air-gapped PC that, on boot, will print out a series of random numbers which will also be saved in on-board memory. I'll have to write a start-up script but I don't think that'll be too difficult.
I have a few more components to buy and another couple of weeks before I'm up and running but at least the major parts are here.

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