On Feb 16, 2012, at 9:22 AM, Kenneth Goldman wrote: > Many laptops and desktops and some servers now come with a TPM chip, > a free source of hardware random numbers.
Even aside from TPM or other HSMs, hardware random number generators have been a common feature of PC motherboard chipsets for a decade or so. I assume, perhaps optimistically, that the /dev/?random devices that modern OSs provide make use of these RNGs as well as other system entropy sources (interrupt timing and so on). It sounds like most of the low-entropy keys discovered by Lenstra+co belong not to desktop/server machines but to embedded devices such as firewalls or VPN boxes; it's easy to imagine that such a device, without a hardware RNG and generating its secret key immediately after its first boot, fresh from factory initialization, could have a hard time getting enough entropy. ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager majord...@openssl.org
