Re: People trust that?
@aldakka: purely in theory, yes
but there are quite a few people that de-lid and de-cap Intel CPUs to look what they actually do on the silicon level, then there's the thing of CPU having very well defined outputs for given inputs, again, something that quite a few people verify before using the CPU in question
and then we have the RNG, circuit that *by design* produces inscrutable and unpredictable outputs for all inputs. Does it do that by encrypting a counter with AES and a key a TLA knows? or does it do that by getting the data from some quantum process? can't really tell (and believe me, people have looked at it, there are plenty of papers on the topic)
so while, yes, one single person can't be certain that the CPU doesn't switch completely predictable bytes in place where the USB provided random bytes should be, as a community we can be reasonably sure it doesn't do that; can't say the same of the built-in RNG
