Re: Waiting for Randot (or: nia and maya were right and I was wrong)

[Taylor R Campbell <riastradh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

> Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2021 13:21:58 +0100
> From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
> 
> On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 10:15:41AM +0000, nia wrote:
> > I still think my idea to record a second of noise from /dev/audio on
> > machines that totally lack other strong sources is a good one. We did
> > already put together the code and test it on a range of hardware and
> > VMs.
> 
> And what about systems that don't have a /dev/audio (or system that have
> play-only /dev/audio) ?

What about them?  Systems without usable microphone noise are no worse
off than they would have been without nia's suggestion.

If a machine doesn't have any unpredictable inputs, well, there's no
magic we can do -- you can copy a seed over from another machine (on a
private network where you're confident there's no eavesdropper), and
there's always the last resort of flipping a coin 256 times and doing
`echo tththtttht... >/dev/urandom' (or rolling a six-sided die 100
times, &c.).