p1necone
11 hours ago
My first question would be whether it's possible to influence the output via triggering power fluctuations on the motherboard - e.g. by running expensive code to cause the CPU/GPU to scale up.
gus_massa
9 hours ago
Probably not. It's hard to guess, but they probably get a Poison Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution in the detector, they may read only a few of the lower bits of the data, and then mix them in the entropy pool, with other sources. So the end result is quite unpredictable.
It's somehow similar to a random generator where you have 5 dices, roll them and then add to the entropy pool only if the total was even or odd. Changing the power is like forcing the system to use only 4 dices. It changes the probabilities a little, but not in a very controlable way, and with a good mixing in the entropy pool it's almost irrelevant.
dmesg
2 hours ago
I read the actual open access paper: https://opg.optica.org/oe/viewmedia.cfm?uri=oe-33-11-22154&s...
Note if you look at the paper, you notice a close but not entirely perfect normal distribution, but nothing you cannot fix with UDNs and Irwin-Hall. For reference how that is done you can read the bottom of this very useful RNG article: https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/RP2040/C...
My overall verdict on the tech in OP is that it is amazingly promising!