Spinners and compression functions

[JonWienke@aol.com]

Since there has been a lot of discussion about spinners derived from various
things (idle loops, video retrace, etc.) used as entropy sources, here is yet
another idea.  Run the spinner output through a PKZip type compression
function, and then seed a PRNG with the output from that.  This would provide
a means of gauging the amount of entropy that has been fed into the PRNG,
(count the bytes output from the compression function) which will allow the
program to disallow any output from the PRNG until a sufficient amount of
entropy has been fed into it.  Even if there are correlations in the spinner
data, (I know, that is obvious) by the time it has gone through the
compression function and the PRNG, it should be cryptographically useful,
especially if entropy from multiple sources (keyboard & mouse events, disk
access times, network access times, etc.) is used to seed the same PRNG.

Jonathan Wienke

Political Rant:
Re: e$ Signorage
>And there I was thinking it was the right for Greenspan to sleep with any 
>unmarried woman on the eve of her wedding...

Actually, that's "prima nocte" (Latin for 'bimbo eruptions" [:)] ) and the
principal beneficiary is our beloved President...