Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 5 from 3 users
Re: How can you verify the randomness that's coming from a hardware?
by
n0nce
on 10/05/2022, 17:17:08 UTC
⭐ Merited by Welsh (2) ,vapourminer (2) ,ETFbitcoin (1)
Are we ever going to see truly open source hardware in personal computers
I don't think that's going to help. It will allow other manufacturers to produce the same chips, and the customer can choose which one to buy. But if any of those manufacturers changes something (say a fake random generator) in the hardware, it will be impossible for the customer to detect.
If you market your laptop as open-source, running stock RISC-V, but have something else under the hood, I'm pretty sure that's considered fraud. I don't know if as a business (e.g. if pressured by agencies or whatnot), I'd rather just go back to AMD / Intel (with some excuse for the customers) than having a fake RISC-V chip produced and hoping nobody leaks anything (factory, production line, engineers, ...) about this fraud.

Rolling a dice gives certainly more than 2 bits uncertainty, since 2 bits is one of 4 choices, while the dice is one in 6.
I don't follow. In 4 out of the 6 results, it gives 2 bits (00, 01, 10, 11) while in 2 out of the 6 results, it gives 1 bit (0, 1). Isn't this (4*2 + 2*1)/6 = 10/6 = 1.666 bits in each result on average?
Oh no, no, no, you can't do that! Grin You can't just split and add probabilities at will.
Aren't both j2002ba2 and BlackHatCoiner right? Yes, a dice roll produces 2.58 bits of entropy, but no, you're not using all of it when writing down dice rolls. If you roll 1, 2, 3 or 4, you treat the dice as if it's a 4-sided dice that produces 2 bits of entropy. And if you roll 5 or 6, you treat the dice as if you flipped a coin. So you end up with 1.66 bits of entropy on average per roll.
That's how people use dice rolls for deducing a seed? They handle it differently based on the number they get? Then the formula from BlackHatCoiner makes sense, but it seems like a questionable way to create a seed. At that point just toss a coin or just use the dice as a 50/50 randomness; 0 bit for even and 1 for odd number on top.