[guardian-dev] Accelerometer as a source of entropy

[Hans of Guardian]

On May 6, 2013, at 11:33 PM, Nathan of Guardian wrote:

> On 05/03/2013 10:59 AM, Abel Luck wrote:
>> Nathan: where can we find the code? We need this for Gnupg key generation.
> 
> Unfortunately this was written in Javascript for use with the PhoneGap
> version of CryptoCat.
> 
> I don't think it would be that hard to do though... here is a good
> staring point:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15622497/android-magnetometer-returning-random-values

I think the proper way to do it is to somehow feed the sensor data into the kernel's entropy engine, so that's its available via /dev/random.  I've heard that its possible to just write data to /dev/random, but I don't know the details.

We certainly don't want to be responsible for another incident like the infamous Debian ssh key incident, so I say we need to be very careful when messing with sources of randomness.

.hc