3 ms·
As far as I know, the counts per minute for background radiation you get with cheap compact captors (say the stuff you find on Geiger counters) is pretty low, a
by Bayart 4y ago
As far as I know, the counts per minute for background radiation you get with cheap compact captors (say the stuff you find on Geiger counters) is pretty low, a dozen to a hundred counts per minute. That's not a lot of entropy. You could much more precise captors, but then you couldn't just plug it into a PCIe slot. At this scale, you probably get more entropy from just jitter on the electrical circuit. And it's pointless to have one huge centralized RNG, at least from a security standpoint.
- tgflynn 4y ago> You could much more precise captors What do you mean by that ? There are only so many particles of ionizing radiation traversing a given surface per unit time (fortunately for us).
- Bayart 4y agoI meant bigger. But it doesn't sound quite as nice as "precise".
- idiocrat 4y agoYou can open up a cheap USB camera to get the nacked CCD sensor and put a radioactive source (Americium-241) from a smoke detector directly onto the chip. The CCD sensor, connected as USB camera, will record thousands of flashes/sec capturing the alpha radiation.