← Entropy Atlas
Fresh or unique
Backoff & contention jitter
Small random delays stop many devices from retrying in lockstep.
Evaluation card
What “plenty” means here.
- Required property
- Enough independent variation to spread retries over the available window.
- If it fails
- Correlated clients create retry storms, collisions, and synchronized load spikes.
- Relevant attacker
- Usually the shared timing pattern; adversarial clients matter in denial-of-service designs.
- The Plenty Line
- Use the protocol’s bounded jitter distribution with independent per-client state.
- Why more is not automatically better
- Cryptographic secrecy is usually unnecessary; an oversized delay range can make recovery needlessly slow.
Where it appears
Recognize the pattern.
- 01Ethernet contention
- 02API retry jitter
- 03wireless access backoff
The Plentropy rule
Protect the requirement, then stop.
Use the protocol’s bounded jitter distribution with independent per-client state.
Once that claim has comfortable evidence and margin, improve the next limiting factor instead of worshipping a larger entropy number.