| This discussion highlights the importance of making sure that hardware vendors understand the need for working clocks that can be easily bootstrapped. In addition to NTP radio clock receivers are ubiquitous, tiny and ridiculously cheap. It is unconscionable that any consumer electronics are sold today that boast a visible clock without including a radio clock receiver! This doesn't fix the mountain of already deployed SOHO gear, but it is time for vendors that know better (Cisco, Netgear, D-Link, etc.) to do the right thing. I put entropy in a similar class of problem as radio clock receivers. There are a number of reasonable sources for entropy that take up virtually no PCB space and can be built with a few discrete components (thinking of quantum effects between 2 transistor gates or zener breakdown noise on a zener diode). Stronger entropy sources get expensive - but something that provides reasonable entropy for light crypto should be available on SOHO class network gear. On Sep 12, 2013, at 2:19 PM, robert bownes wrote:
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