Raspberry Pi camera as RNG?

[scruss]

I know that the Raspberry Pi has a built-in hardware RNG, but given that high-ISO sensor thermal noise is pretty much the definition of a hardware RNG, could the camera plus the GPU be used to pump out a fairly solid entropy stream? I know that the rest of the Raspberry Pi's hardware would be a bit of a bottleneck, and I'm not even sure I have an application for such a beast, so I'm just thinking out loud here.

[jbeale]

No fundamental reason why not, but maybe some practical issues. The existing image processor has a strong noise filter that works against you in this application, so you'd want to work with the raw, pre-filtered data. The recent opening of the GPU register descriptions did not apply to the camera interface subsystem, so that portion remains as closed as ever.

Raspistill has an option to export RAW + Jpeg so you could work with that, but obviously not as quickly as you could on the GPU.

[scruss]

Ah well - it was but an idea. Thank you.