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Could timing be used to seed a cpu? ie, not all cpus are built the same, and similarly for all powersupplies, could the two be used together to bootstrap seeding i.e. by measuring voltage or voltage differences?



Tha'ts effectively how a lot of the jitter sourced entropy ends up working, sometimes in a more round about way though.


Yes! I went to a talk given by a security researcher who proposed using the difference in clocks between north bridge and south bridge to generate randomness.


this article mentions timing of hardware interrupts as an entropy source. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72...


another possible entropy source: the sequence of different kinds of hardware interrupts should be very hard to predict.




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