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by londons_explore 3220 days ago
There are lots of people in the crypto world who have serious issues with XORing random sources together.

I haven't yet seen a good argument why it's a bad idea, and part of me thinks it might be a way to get more software using "rdrand" or other insecure sources unmodified.

1 comments

I think the bad idea stigma stems from people XORing from the same source. That totally is a bad idea, but if two sources are wholly independent, the maximum entropy in the combined systems is maintained.

To the people that just say it's never a good idea and scoff at any reasoning I'd remind them about OTPs. They are a special case related to this principle of XORing two independent sources together where only one input is random and it is proven mathematically to work.