Ask HN: Why don’t PCs have better entropy sources?
by bloopernova on Hacker News.
After reading the thread “Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random” (1) I was wondering why PCs don’t have a bunch of sensors available to draw entropy from. Is this assumption correct, that adding a magnetometer, accelerometer, simple GPS, etc to a motherboard would improve its entropy gathering? Or is there a mathematical/cryptographical rule that makes the addition of such sensors useless? Do smartphones have better entropy gathering abilities? It seems like phones would be able to seed a RNG based on input from a variety of sensors that would all be very different between even phones in the same room. Looking at a GPS Android app like Satstat (2) it feels like there’s a huge amount of variability to draw from. If such sensors would add better entropy, would it really cost that much to add them to PC motherboards? —- (1) https://ift.tt/WRK5Q2C (2) https://ift.tt/iHTLuKa & https://ift.tt/46iJbxY…