Thursday, October 27th, 2011, 7:45 pm
Entropy Key
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oday I received an early Christmas gift of sorts — a package from a fellow advocate of GNU/Linux called Kari Laine. It will provide a lot of geeky-type fun for a home project I Intend to write a review about at a later date.
The company behind Entrypt Key is apparently based on England, but the product was sent to me from Finland Interestingly, I first studied Shannon’s entropy quite thoroughly while I was starting my Ph.D. in 2003. My work was an extension inspired by Jorma Rissanen‘s Minimum Description Length (MDL), which built upon entropy research. He is Finnish.
Setting everything up is a project on its own, possibly taking an hour if not a whole weekend (depending on how deeply one dives into it). The installation process seems simple enough and the instructions are clear. The fun begins when it comes to studying the theory and application, which promise to secure one’s environment by generating good random passwords without depending on something more common like system clock or mouse movement. Some go further to reduce predictability, e.g. using observation of a lava lamp. Very exotic.
Entropy key should be aimed at geeks like myself, who like to learn how things work and also have some associated equipment and gadgets, e.g. to set servers up in a more professional way. It would make a great gift to science/computer science enthusiasts.
More information can be found in http://www.entropykey.co.uk/
October 28th, 2011 at 5:19 pm
How do you test a source like a lava lamp to prove adequate randomness? Inadequate sampling can do more harm than good. A slow input will take a long time to prove in practice.