Generating random numbers

["Mike Johnson" <exabyte!smtplink!mikej@uunet.UU.NET>]

If you have an audio input to your computer, try recording noise from a fan,
traffic on a busy street, or the roar of a crowd at a football game.  Then
compress the output to remove any obvious redundancies such as 60 Hz hum from
a fan motor or unused dynamic range of the input digitizer.  This results in
much better "randomness" than some keystroke timing techniques.

Of course, writing cryptographic software would be a whole lot easier if all
computers had a built in real random number generating device that could
produce quantum physics related data as fast as you could read it.  Anyone
want to build a serial or parallel port attachment that could be read by
any software needing random numbers for crypto or other applications?


                                        Mike Johnson
                                        mpjohnso@nyx.cs.du.edu