tangential question; does anyone know of a cheap hardware random number generator for PCs. thanks.
It's a ~$50 USB dongle, opensource and available for shipping. Anecdotally, I personally used it for an RF project that need uniform randomness and exhausted /dev/random on the target hardware. It worked fine, if a bit slow for my very specific usecase.
That said, if you want to go even cheaper, seriously consider if you can just stick with /dev/urandom. See http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/ for an interesting read on why that might just work.
https://github.com/waywardgeek/infnoise
https://www.tindie.com/products/WaywardGeek/infinite-noise-t...
I remember him from the CipherShed project that was trying to reboot TrueCrypt. Discussed securing the build system & distribution. He seemed smart. I have no experience with Tindie, though, so I'd appreciate feedback from anyone that knows about them. He also includes BOM, etc on the GitHub so someone can source and build it themselves.
If you're really paranoid, just do this:
$ echo "<bash face against keyboard multiple times>" >> /dev/random
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand
The potential of an NSA backdoor in it is a popular, and entirely possible, conspiracy theory, of course. You'd have to decide for yourself, and compare it to your trust in other options.