Comments on: The Entropy Key

By: Aaron Toponce

Aaron Toponce — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:28:20 +0000

Sure it does. It’s also only $40. Versus the USB TRNG98 which costs $830. It may give you more bang for your buck, but you need to spend an extra $790 to get it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that sort of money lying around.

By: guy

guy — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:48:49 +0000

Jonathan Dill, the entropy key already costs a whole hell of a lot more per bit/second than other options.

By: Jonathan Dill

Jonathan Dill — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:33:43 +0000

Thanks for the info on Simtec, I ordered an entropy key nearly a month ago and was beginning to wonder what was going on, sounds like it will probably be another month until I get it if ever, disappointing. There are some other options but rather expensive, Simtec could double their price and hire more personnel and still be well below the competition.

By: Aaron Toponce

Aaron Toponce — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:26:49 +0000

Unfortunately, contacting Simtec Electronics is a massive failure. The best I could figure out, is the company underwent a massive employee and infrastructure change, and there is maybe one or two employees left. All my emails to sales@, info@, and support@ went unanswered. It took them nearly 8 weeks to ship the 5 keys I did order. The only person that would respond to any email query was Paul Martin. His email address is pm@. Other than that, I don’t know what else to tell you. I certainly won’t be doing business with them again, which is unfortunate. They have an awesome product. Just a less-than-awesome company.

If you need randomness for your infrastructure, instead of the entropy key, I would look at Haveged. I’ve blogged about it a few times here already. If you need to deliver bits over the network, there is the entropy-broker at http://www.vanheusden.com/entropybroker/ which can do this for you.

By: David Williams

David Williams — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 12:03:01 +0000

Hi Aaron,
I wonder if you could help us. We bought an Entopykey a while ago and have been impressed with its performance. We would like to buy some more but the company’s phone numbers displayed on their website do not seem to work. Please could you send me their contact details.
Thanks very much
Regards,
David Williams

By: Aaron Toponce : The Entropy Server

Aaron Toponce : The Entropy Server — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:16:12 +0000

[...] With my last post about the entropy key hardware true random number generator (TRNG), I was curious if I could set this up as a server. Basically, bind to a port that spits out true random bits over the internet, and allow clients to connect to it to fill their own entropy pools. One of the reasons I chose the entropy key from Simtec was because they provide Free Software client and server applications to make this possible. [...]

By: Aaron Toponce

Aaron Toponce — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 13:33:37 +0000

There are two reasons for 5 keys which will be apparent on the next post, one of which was getting a discount. However, having 5 keys does increase the randomness of the data, in volume. You now have 5 times the amount of data coming to your entropy pool.

By: Terry Bohaning

Terry Bohaning — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:24:02 +0000

Aaron,

Interesting piece of hardware. One thing that I’m curious about is why you are using 5 keys. Is that just to have enough information to really compare the devices or does increasing the number of keys increase the randomness of the data?

Terry