RE: DIGEST-MD5 and {nonce,cnonce}

["Howard Chu" <hyc@highlandsun.com>]

> Though a computer systems has very low entropy, that is, it is
> highly orderred, 

Unless you happen to be running a Microsoft OS...  (sorry, couldn't resist)

>I concur that you likely could extract reasonable
> entropy from system memory.  A sound approach would to compute a
> MD5 hash of the WHOLE contents of memory.
> 
> However, bits choosen at random will have low entropy.
> To demonstrate this, how about a little wager.  I will bet you
> a penny per bit that I can guess values of randomly choosen
> bits from /dev/mem.  How many bits would you like to play
> for?  Oh, by the way, I guess zero for all bits.  :-)

OK, point taken...
  -- Howard