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0 pointsUweSchmidt11y ago0 comments

Any vendor of hardware RNGs can easily and secretly be forced to build in a backdoor (including the one we're discussing here, as you kinda need to trust that these tiny little microchips do what they claim to do). Actually, selling fake TRNGs would be a low cost, high reward excercise for any intelligence agency anyway.

Corrupted TRNGs don't make things worse, but also not better, and you keep depending on your existing entropy sources, whatever their quality may be.

Therefore providing computers with TRNGs made by Intel etc. would only create a false sense of security.

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ars11y ago

I think you majorly underestimate the "easily" part. You can make a pattern with your RNG, but once mixed it's pretty useless. Making one that can handle that is not in the slightest easy.

> would only create a false sense of security.

You are assuming that your only adversary is the chip maker, but this type of RNG (if it were even possible to make it) would still be helpful in the other 99.99% of uses for randomness.

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