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I've submitted this[0] to HN a few times but it's never caught on. Unlike this, it isn't a publicity stunt and it's in your pocket. It's pretty neat to be abl

I've submitted this[0] to HN a few times but it's never caught on. Unlike this, it isn't a publicity stunt and it's in your pocket. It's pretty neat to be able to short circuit most of the nation state tinfoil hat concerns by rolling your own private key. However, if you're going this far then you likely think most every internet connected, commercially available device is compromised. In that case then generating a private key on such a device would be pointless. 0. https://medium.com/vault12/how-to-get-true-randomness-from-your-apple-device-with-particle-physics-and-thermal-entropy-a9d47ca80c9b https://medium.com/vault12/how-to-get-true-randomness-from-y...

ncmncm 5y ago
The article starts out with, "it is very hard to find sources of good randomness". Then it goes on to show that fantastically good sources of randomness are everywhere, on every phone, on every laptop. Even where there is no camera, there is often a radio receiver, or a microphone, and the low bits of the A/D converter from those are just as good. It goes on to belabor the issue of runs of zeroes from oversaturated pixels. Stirring the whole frame into your entropy pool, all the non-random bits simply fail to add any entropy; they are otherwise harmless, no-op bits. But every frame has more than enough entropy, so the only way it matters is that stirring in a string of zeroes consumes power without adding entropy. If it takes as much energy to filter out the zeroes as to stir them in, you have achieved nothing by filtering them.