The Strange Story of Dual_EC_DRBG – suspected NSA backdoor (2007)
Out of curiosity, why can't we just use a series of sensors on the computer to generate random numbers? Between mouse movements, touch inputs, video camera input, microphone movements, the behavior of applications in your system and how they use resources like RAM, CPU, hard-disk, listening to all the wifi + bluetooth signals around you and munging them, etc. I would imagine that there is enough entropy coming in through input and being generated by whatever the computer is doing to be able to have lots of unpredictable random numbers.I don't know much at all about cryptography, but why aren't all the natural sources of entropy an adequate source of random numbers?