From weidai@eskimo.com Sat Apr 22 09:09:29 PDT 2000
Article: 5400 of isaac.lists.cryptography
Path: news.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu!not-for-mail
From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
Newsgroups: isaac.lists.cryptography
Subject: Re: Entropy-gathering gizmos for NT?
Date: 29 Mar 2000 13:44:27 -0800
Organization: ISAAC Group, UC Berkeley
Lines: 18
Sender: daemon@abraham.cs.berkeley.edu
Approved: mail2news@news.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu
Distribution: isaac
Message-ID: <20000329131320.K29936@eskimo.com>
References: <200003291554.HAA10132@breakaway.Stanford.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: abraham.cs.berkeley.edu
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i
In-Reply-To: <200003291554.HAA10132@breakaway.Stanford.EDU>; from Jeff.Hodges@stanford.edu on Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 07:54:03AM -0800
Xref: joseph.cs.berkeley.edu isaac.lists.cryptography:5400

On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 07:54:03AM -0800, Jeff.Hodges@stanford.edu wrote:
> I'm curious about what all entropy-gathering gizmos, a la "Entropy Gathering 
> Deamon" (EGD) <url:http://www.lothar.com/tech/crypto/>, might be available 
> for/on NT -- anyone know?
> 
> My understanding is that such stuff is effectively built-into Win2K -- anyone 
> have comments/observations on that?

It's built into Microsoft's base CryptoAPI service provider, which is
available on Win2K and any Windows OS after Windows 95 I think. You can
do something like this:

// untested
HCRYPTPROV hProvider = 0;
BYTE randomBytes[128];
CryptAcquireContext(&hProvider, 0, 0, PROV_RSA_FULL, CRYPT_VERIFYCONTEXT);
CryptGenRandom(hProvider, sizeof(randomBytes), randomBytes);