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Totally Random One Time Pads

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the random-is-as-random-does dept.

liliafan writes "Scientists in Japan have come up with a way of harnessing a truly random datasource for generating one time encryption pads: Quasars. One time encryption pads are widely accepted as being the most secure form of encryption, but this new technology from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology makes the pads even more secure."

3 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. So what? by rsw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Getting randomness isn't interesting. Thermal noise is truly random, perfectly white, and easy to generate---it's as hard as passing a current through a resistor. Want more noise power? Avalanche breakdown, with appropriate whitening, works fine.

    Unless they've come up with an interesting way for two people in disparate locations to observe the same quasar and both independently observe the same random phenomena in a way which reliably and securely gives them access to the pad with no communication channel between them, this just isn't interesting.

    -rsw

  2. not so sure about this by argoff · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I imagine someone who wanted to could buy enough equiptment to record all known quasar emmissions and store them
    or try them against encrypted data streams. A million quasars with 5000 possible frequencies each, wouldn't be that
    much for a computer to churn thru. In a way, it almost seems like security thru obscurity.

  3. Re:That's not randomness at all by Eric+Smith · · Score: 3, Interesting
    That's not randomness at all. It only seems random
    An interesting assertion, but without any backing evidence.
    they're confusing randomness with unpredictability
    There isn't any particularly better definition of randomness than "unpredicability". Some things are more unpredicable than others. Some things can even be proven to be unpredictable; for instance, the Blum-Blum-Shub PRNG has been proven to be unpredictable if you don't have a copy of its internal state, because it is mathematically intractable to derive the state from the output.

    It seems unlikely that it will become possible to predict the behavior of quasars as you suggest; we can't even accurately predict the weather on earth, which is a much smaller system than a quasar. For that matter, we can't predict the detailed behavior of a lava lamp, making that a reasonable source of random numbers (but patented!).