PCQNG

PCQNG is a handy application that you can use in order to extract True Physical Entropy data that is constantly generated by hardware components present on your computer.

With the extracted data,PCQNG generates high-speed stream of virtually perfect random numbers containing one bit of actual entropy per output bit. The generator's output is made easily available through PCQNG in a number of user selectable modes.

Many suggestions have been made for possible methods of obtaining entropy from personal computers. These include keyboard timing or intervals, following mouse movements and timing, and air turbulence in hard drives. There have also been many vague ideas of using the various timing signals from subsystems in the PC, such as the BIOS clock, the serial card and the real time clock.

In addition to these are the progressively more restrictive ideas that require certain additional hardware to be attached to your computer. These include measuring ping response time on computers which are networked, digitizing static from a radio receiver through the sound card, and finally, even using digitized images of Lava Lamps.

All these ideas suffer from one or more limitation or theoretical flaw which have made them virtually unusable as practical sources of random numbers. The most serious defect in all the methods proposed is that there is no theoretical basis for precisely quantifying the actual entropy content of the output sequence.

There is usually no acceptable method of predicting, or even measuring the statistical properties of those sequences within necessary confidence levels. The output bit rate is sometimes measured in bits per minute and some of the methods require the active, physical participation of the PC user (you) to produce any output at all.