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Article #279

Random Hardware Port Wanted

#279
From: ? pruss
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 1990 13:57
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We are looking for a hardware port that we can IN from to find
a fairly random time-dependent number.

What we will use this number for is seeding a random number generator.
We cannot use either the BIOS nor the DOS clock for this purpose, for
various security reasons.  (This is for security purposes and we do not
want people to be able to overwrite the BIOS or DOS clocks with a desired
seed). 

If there is no constant port like that, a list of possible ports would
be welcome...  we would just xor the values together and use that.

Alexander Pruss
pruss@ria.ccs.uwo.ca
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Message-ID: <217@ria.ccs.uwo.ca>
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!ria!pruss

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!ria!pruss
From: pruss@ria.ccs.uwo.ca (? pruss)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
Subject: Random Hardware Port Wanted
Summary: What port holds a random value?
Keywords: random seed port hardware unportable
Message-ID: <217@ria.ccs.uwo.ca>
Date: 10 Apr 90 13:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
Lines: 14