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56 points giuliomagnifico | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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p1necone ◴[] No.45269849[source]
My first question would be whether it's possible to influence the output via triggering power fluctuations on the motherboard - e.g. by running expensive code to cause the CPU/GPU to scale up.
replies(1): >>45270714 #
gus_massa ◴[] No.45270714[source]
Probably not. It's hard to guess, but they probably get a Poison Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution in the detector, they may read only a few of the lower bits of the data, and then mix them in the entropy pool, with other sources. So the end result is quite unpredictable.

It's somehow similar to a random generator where you have 5 dices, roll them and then add to the entropy pool only if the total was even or odd. Changing the power is like forcing the system to use only 4 dices. It changes the probabilities a little, but not in a very controlable way, and with a good mixing in the entropy pool it's almost irrelevant.

replies(1): >>45273574 #
1. dmesg ◴[] No.45273574[source]
I read the actual open access paper: https://opg.optica.org/oe/viewmedia.cfm?uri=oe-33-11-22154&s...

Note if you look at the paper, you notice a close but not entirely perfect normal distribution, but nothing you cannot fix with UDNs and Irwin-Hall. For reference how that is done you can read the bottom of this very useful RNG article: https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/RP2040/C...

My overall verdict on the tech in OP is that it is amazingly promising!