[liberationtech] USB Block Erupters as RNG sources?

[Peter Gutmann]

d.nix <d.nix at comcast.net> writes:

>Curious; anyone know much about what these inexpensive (comparatively, price
>seems steadily falling) ASIC Block Erupter USB Bitcoin miners can be adapted
>to doing? Could they be repurposed as RNG sources?

"Very little", and "no".  They're basically custom Bitcoin-mining ASICs, I
looked at one a while back for use in password-cracking and they're really not
suited for it at all, you load a vector in and say "go" but since they're
quite I/O-limited you can't easily adapt them for hash-breaking.  As for RNG
use, they're entirely deterministic, how would you use them as an RNG source?

Peter.