From: Alex Ramonsky (alex@ramonsky.com)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 06:12:05 MDT
Thankyou to everyone for all the time & trouble helping with
this...unfortunately, I wasn't clear enough about what I was after...
None of the suggestions actually meet my requirements (although thank
you for all of them)! I'll try to be a bit more specific...
'Reasonably affordable' = <$400
'hardware'='a self-contained physical device , which I can plug into one
of the ports on the back of my PC' (of course, this does include mouse
and keyboard)
'with software driver for windows' ...speaks for itself.
There is also a fourth requirement which I didn't state, which is that
the random numbers generated must be secret; that is, unknown to anybody
else. This requirement precludes the use of any web sources of random
bits, such as HotBits, since an eavesdropper could intercept them and
know what bits I'd used. It must be self-contained, and usable on a
computer which is not connected to the internet.
...The concept (thanks Charles!) of writing some kind of background
process to accumulate keystrokes sounds like a workable alternative
solution. I confess I don't know how to write drivers for Windows, but I
guess I do have enough programming knowledge to accumulate the bits and
stick them in a file. I also know how to crypto-hash them to sort out
the distribution, and I guess this would probably do.
Being a lazy sloth, I was rather hoping for an off-the-shelf
plug-and-play peripheral that I could just stick into the USB port and,
lo and behold, it would simply work first time and wouldn't cost
thousands of dollars. : )
It seems odd that if I can buy a printer or scanner that meets these
requirements for less than $100, why can't I find a simple device
consisting of a resistor and an A2D converter for a similar price! Is
this such an outlandish concept, or am I just completely mad in hoping
for it?
Ramonsky
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