Ask HN: Why don't PCs have better entropy sources?
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?
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?
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(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848973
(2) https://mvglasow.gitlab.io/satstat/ & https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.satsta...