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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kevin K. Spurway who wrote (47010)	1/22/1999 1:30:00 PM
From: MikeyB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580283

There is no such thing as perfect security. I take it back there is. Only you know the secret and the only way for me to find out is if you tell me and you are dead. That is the only perfect security. The objective of encryption and encoding technologies is to make breaking the systems as difficult as possible. The more difficult the more secure it is. Now if I'm reading the new features of the PIII correctly, there is a hardware psuedo-random number generator and a unique ID code. From Paul's description, the hw random number generator may very closely approximate true random number generator (the seed being chaotic thermal noise). The problem with software RNG is that the seed value is generally not very random (ie. predictable). Intel's hw RNG is obviously a huge boon to those applications dependent upon random numbers (eg. many encryption technologies). The unique ID code may be useful with digital signatures but I tend to not limit myself to one computer or even my own computer. It would be cumbersome for me to have a helluva lot of digital signatures when I could have just one to use on various machines. If the unique ID code were to be used in any other application (eg. available to whatever website i happen to accidently traverse), I would hope to be able to find a way to disable it in hardware or use a cpu that didn't have that feature mainly because it would be soooooo easy to forge. MikeyB