Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Buy Intel, yes this is investment advice



Investment advice just not mine. The Market-Ticker blog run by Karl Denninger is infamous for many things including singlehandedly causing a world wide web shortage of bold text and exclamation points.

 Today however KD has followed up his never to be forgotten call to short Apple (plus several hundred percent since) and long Research In Motion (was RIMM now BBRY and down ninety plus percent since). All because of a startling Snowden revelation. Not so startling actually. Snowden asserts what many have long suspected, that modern Intel hardware random registers are not random sufficient for encryption purposes. On this basis KD thinks Intel will stumble as a company. Nonsense.

 Firstly. If the RRand function is compromised it is only more compromised than the limits of Turing computable devices anyway. No one relies on just machine code random for generating keys for this reason. Here. Let Torvals and Tso explain it back in September in an article in, of all places, The UK Register.

 The kernel chieftain wrote: “We use rdrand as _one_ of many inputs into the random pool, and we use it as a way to _improve_ that random pool. So even if rdrand were to be back-doored by the NSA, our use of rdrand actually improves the quality of the random numbers you get from /dev/random. Really short answer: you're ignorant.” Random-number generation for the kernel space were implemented in 1994 by Theodore Ts'o using secure hashes instead of ciphers. As Tso wrote here following the latest selectively released information by journalists allied to Snowden: I am so glad I resisted pressure from Intel engineers to let /dev/random rely only on the RDRAND instruction... Relying solely on the hardware random number generator which is using an implementation sealed inside a chip which is impossible to audit is a BAD idea.

3 comments:

Stagflationary Mark said...

The Market-Ticker blog run by Karl Denninger is infamous for many things including singlehandedly causing a world wide web shortage of bold text and exclamation points.

Nice, lol.

The random number generator on my relatively ancient graphics calculator cannot fill the screen randomly. I still use that calculator nearly 30 years later though. Shocking. ;)

As a former lead engineer at a computer game company, I used the random generator from a Numerical Recipes book (if memory serves) just so I could get consistent results on multiple platforms. I also tested it to verify that it could fill the screen randomly. Shocking. ;)

It's a "shocking" two-fer, lol.

Stagflationary Mark said...

I don't mean to imply that clearing the screen randomly proves that an algorithmic random number generator is good. None can pass every test of course. For most practical purposes, some just do better than others. Clearing the screen randomly is definitely a practical purpose (when making games anyway).

Rob Dawg said...

Gosh, you are as old as me. I used to have to do the Page number, column number, row number seed thing too.

Did you like the double exponential failure in the previous post?