Slashdot Mirror
LavaRnd: A Open Source Project for Truly Random Numbers
Phil Windley writes "Truly random numbers are crucial to good encryption.
Most people have heard of Silicon Graphic's use of Lava Lamps to generate random numbers. There were some problems: it required special SGI hardware and software along with six lava lamps, and the solution wasn't portable. But the biggest drawback was that SGI patented the idea so it wasn't freely available. Now, some of the scientists behind the SGI random number system have create LavaRnd, an open source project for creating truly random numbers using inexpensive cameras, open source code, and inexpensive hardware. The system uses a saturated CCD in a light-tight can as a chaotic source to produce the seed. Software processes the result into truly random numbers in a variety of formats. The result is a random number that is crytographically sound, ranking at the top of its class in the NIST 800-22 Billion bit test. Its even portable, so the truly paranoid can take it with them when they travel."
...
...
start with radioactive material...
... hi bingo
Nothing is truly random about a lava lamp, or even the fractals on a leaf. "Randomness" as we understand it has always been about complex order and large numbers. Meaning, it's too complex for us to see the pattern and the statistical possibility of numbers occuring in a measurable pattern over time is extremely low.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Hey! Quit spoiling the party with actual facts!
Seriously though. Your point is valid. In our universe, (good) psuedorandom numbers are just as random as anything else in the universe (that we consider random). The real problem is that people look for a distinction between random and pseudorandom when none exists.
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums...
Right, and then there's the problem of isolation. The reason that the camera in this project is in a sealed box is because that if you are going to try and actually prove mathematically that the randomness of the system is truly random, it needs to be in isolation, outside of the realm of any intervention.
Therefore, just putting a mic in a room allows for the possibility that the seed can be manipulated, although figuring out what sounds to make in the room to do so in a predicatable manner is incredibley difficult, it's still possible and therefore not theoretically sound.
Answer: none of them were random; all of them chosen by you off the top of your head. There are important mathematical differences between these two cases. What you have given is sets of "arbitrary" numbers, rather than "random" numbers.
Now, if you'd asked which of the sets could be generated randomly, then the answer is all of them, given a generator function with the correct output range.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Nothing, it's a/the correct answer.
It IS interesting: the concept that even numbers do not have free will.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
What about radiation? I remember way back in physics using a piece of radioactive material in front of a sensor connected to a computer to generate a large number of random numbers. It would be fairly easy to use a small piece of Californium such as is in a smoke detector connected to a sensor. The time between radioactive particles should be random enough and it is small enough to fit anywhere.
Actaully it can't change instantaneously (in no time), which shouldn't matter since you can't sample this analog source infinitely fine anyway. Provided your sampling period is large enough the samples could change from lowest to highest in a single sample.
Actually, I think you would wind up using only a single bit at the least significant bit end of the value of the temp. You wouldn't use the whole value.
1 10101.101001100 101 .10110101
This of it this way:
Temp:
00110101.10100111
00110101.11000101
00
00110101.10110101
00110101.10101
00110101.10100010
00110101.10101101
0011010
Each of the temp reading wouldn't be used, but your random values would be
11010011
You throw away all the extra data at the full value and only take the least significant bit as it would be the least stable of the values.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
/joeyo
2^5
I've had a gripe about random number research since I sat in on a guest colloquium on this topic in the late 80's.
The word "random" cannot describe a result, only the process that generates that result. A truly random generator should be entirely capable of generating such patterned sequences like 1,2,3,4,5,6; although it should select them no more or less than any other sequence you care to consider interesting.
Put another way, every seemingly random sequence will mean something very special to somebody eventually.
If you set out with the assumption that such patterned results must never occur, then you have biased your generator against certain results, and your generator is therefore, BY DEFINITION, not random. In fact, a predisposed inability to generate such sequences should be grounds for discrediting a generator.
This drove me crazy (like a splinter, not like explaining Scott Baio's career) all through the lecture and beyond.
But, alas, we live in the world of the human, where we have sex, UFOs, attorneys, crop circles, knee-jerk reactions to politically charged topics and Mighty Mouse. In *THIS* world, the sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6 **IS** special, because we are hopelessly devoid of really genuinely new ideas. Just like computers work be copying, we work by finding and engaging patterns.
So, I decided that randomness has nothing to do with it. Their real goal isn't a flat probability function, but throwing out the first few percent of possibilities the bad guys are likely to try first so they are forced to think harder.
I also decided that when cryptography and number theory people say "random", they really mean "unpredictable" or "unpatterened" and I should just leave it at that. I just wish they hadn't been so careless in choosing language to describe what they were doing that has such a confusingly similar meaning outside their field.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
"Its even portable, so the truly paranoid can take it with them when they travel."
Which one of this is the most likely: - someone manages to get your low-class 'pseudo' random number by extrapolating the exact time of the system clock and the contents of your memory etc. and running it through the algorithem. Someone manages to predict or find your mouse movements by the indents on your mouse mat and the use this to get the same random number you created by moving the mouse in the box. Someone looks over your shoulder and reads the information/password you were trying to hide?
All this assuming you arnt in star trek
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
A number is not 'random'. There is no test you can apply to determine that 25 is random, while 44 is not. Randomness is not a property of individual numbers, it is a property of the number generator or source.
So when people say 'a random number' they really mean 'a number drawn from a random source'.
You're talking about Kolmogorov complexity, I think - the complexity of some data is the length of its shortest description. But even there you have to agree what language the description will be in. You could define a language where 18282822 is represented by the symbol 'A' and any other number is represented by itself.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
> > Yeah, but that's because we intellectually identify those numbers as "special", when they aren't really.
> Actually, those numbers are special in a particular way that makes them not random. They have a low Kormalagorov Complexity, so they're highly compressable. Good random data should be uncompressable.
Actually it's the representation of those numbers that is compressible, which is irrelevant to the randomness of a sequence of numbers.
For instance, the number 1,111,111,111 has a compressible base-10 representation, but if you were working in base 1,111,111,112 it would have an atomic, uncompressible representation. And that distinction is irrelevant to the question of how often it shows up in a random sequence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade