Quote from: larry_vw_1955 on Today at 06:04:57 AM

Quote from: n0nce on Today at 12:09:28 AM

Do you already have a plan for evaluating the entropy of it?

I used https://www.fourmilab.ch/random/ in the past to measure the "entropy" of linux /dev/random from one of my machines. I assume I would do the same thing with this one. Their ent program the output is kind of confusing except for the option that shows character counts. Which is what I basically go off of. They claim:

I don't think this is suited for your application. This program gives you the entropy per byte / character for evaluating data density of a file. It should give a high entropy result, even if the PRNG was seeded with a known seed which would then be used to reconstruct the randomness.
I may be wrong, but I think a program that gives you entropy 'per 64-byte seed' (instead of per-byte) across a large set of generated seeds, instead of calculating entropy across a stream of bytes.

Quote from: larry_vw_1955 on Today at 06:04:57 AM

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I mentioned it earlier in this thread; I think it's just much easier to trust physical entropy (like dice throws) or a relatively straight-forward open-source 'avalanche' circuit on a PCB.

Yeah physical entropy is the way to go for low volume needs which most of us fall into. I trust that the most at the end of the day. Not any of these electronic methods as good as they might seem, you can't really see what is going on. You have to trust what you can't see. Trust past results, trust that it is performing the same as past results. The electronic methods are fun though to investigate. And they might find uses in higher volume applications.

Well, the 'avalanche noise source' electronic method can actually be observed ('see what is going on'); you do need some lab equipment, though. Keep in mind that just visually inspecting the circuit can already give you some confidence that you received the circuit actually specified in the schematic. Inspecting the schematic tells you what the circuit does, so sneaking in some backdoor is going to be pretty hard on a device with such a circuit.