EntropyKey - miniature Windows driver...?

[Nick Pelling]

Hi Rob,

At 13:55 12/07/2010 +0100, Rob Kendrick wrote:
>What do you mean by "patched"?  Replacing it with an alternative
>implementation entirely sounds a bit like a dodgy hack, and Microsoft
>had partially thought about other sources, given you can have multiple
>providers.  They just didn't think it through completely :)

Oh, I didn't know _that_ - I'll ask a crypto friend of mine about this, see 
what the real deal is...

>As I say, it's on the list of things we'd like to do, but haven't had
>time to do yet.  The job is complicated somewhat because the Entropy
>Key itself is complicated.  Other TRNG products are basically dumb
>devices: they feed you random data over a serial port or similar.  The
>Entropy Key has a protocol with encryption and commands, and requires a
>tool to configure them, monitor them, etc.  So just writing a library
>that opens a serial port, reads some bytes, and returns them, won't
>work here.

I'm a little surprised by this, because I've found that Cortex-M3 
microcontrollers are surprisingly capable little beasts. If you reduced the 
effective maximum throughput you were hoping for, do you think the ARM (or 
rather, Thumb2) could do basically everything itself, or was that a design 
decision you consciously avoided?

>Our UNIX driver is entirely open source, under the MIT licence.  You
>can obtain it from the downloads section of the website.  It also
>includes extensive documentation for the protocol and rationale.

OK, I'll go and have a look, then... :-)

Cheers, ....Nick Pelling....