Re: my favorite random-numbers-in-software package (unix)

[Matt Blaze <mab@crypto.com>]

David Merriman writes:
> 
> Even with the exclusion of processors using single-source clocking for
> interval and CPU timing, this would *seem* to be somewhat hazardous. Any two
> clocking mechanisms that are 'mixed' are going to result in a number of
> harmonics, or beat frequencies. While your system - at any given instant -
> is quite likely to have a decent amount of randomness in it, I'd hazard a
> guess that repetitive use would result in a discernible pattern. Even
> something as 'coarse' as an interrupt timer has a finite range that it can
> (must) operate in. Even if the CPU oscillator is based on a ceramic
> resonator (nowhere near as stable/accurate as a crystal), the clock on it is
> going to stay within +/-1% (worst case, for a *really* cheap oscillator) of
> frequency, and drift not more than some number of Parts Per Million per
> Period. Mixing the innate (relative) accuracy of two oscillators, and the
> necessarily limited amount of drift that they're capable of, would seem to
> result in an unacceptably low-yield source of 'real' randomness.

I'm the first to agree that, in the absence of some good analysis of
the exact platform on which it is run, the clock-skew approach is built
on a very weak foundation.  But informal (and completely ad hoc)
analysis suggests that it might be more promising than you'd first
expect.  While the drift between the two clocks is likely only very small,
we're also not asking for very much; we need less than one bit
worth of uncertainty in an accumulator that burns processor cycles until
some (smaller) number of clock intervals have occurred.  (The OS might
also not give you all those cycles, adding to the uncertainty, although
you can't really count on this in the case of high-priority processes or
unloaded machines).

I (and a few others) have run some tests on this on a couple of (bare)
processors in an effort to find artificats of the clock periods in the
low-order bits of the counter, with no success.  This, of course, hardly
constitutes a "proof".

I'd love to see some good analysis of this technique, particularly with
an eye toward quantifying the quality and bandwidth of the output and
finding better parameters for the minimum interval rate, etc.

-matt

PS there are other "magic" techniques for getting randomness without special
hardware that are proposed from time to time but that never really undergo
enough analysis for my taste.  For example, at CRYPTO '94 (or maybe '93)
there was an interesting proposal to use software to measure the air flow
inside the disk drive.