You're throwing out way more information than you have to. Normalizing the input directly is a little silly, you should instead simply estimate how much entropy is in being produced, then hash up all the information you get until it reaches 160 bits, and spit out the sha1 of that in one burst.
It's also a unnecessary to get your bits directly from the source - it's much more efficient to get a seed of 'truly' random bits, then use either AES in counter mode or mersenne twister (depending on your cryptographic needs, or lack thereof) to generate later random numbers.
I'm very bitter about /dev/random blocking unnecessarily. It's a good example of something really basic which the crypto community as a whole can't get its act together on.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2002-11-27 11:34 am (UTC)It's also a unnecessary to get your bits directly from the source - it's much more efficient to get a seed of 'truly' random bits, then use either AES in counter mode or mersenne twister (depending on your cryptographic needs, or lack thereof) to generate later random numbers.
I'm very bitter about /dev/random blocking unnecessarily. It's a good example of something really basic which the crypto community as a whole can't get its act together on.