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True Random Number Generator Goes Online
amigoro writes "A 'true' random number generator that relies on the unpredictable quantum process of photon emission has gone online providing academic and scientific community access to true random numbers free of charge."
..BZT, qvq nalbar frr gung gb ertvfgre lbh unir
gb fbyir n zngu ceboyrz yvxr:
qrevingvir bs (5*fva 3k +6pbf(-cv/2))
Avpr!
Urer vf n qverpg yvax gb gur trarengbe, lbh pna
qbjaybnq gur pyvrag sebz urer nf jryy:
uggc://enaqbz.veo.ue/
DEnaq Pbzznaq-yvar Hgvyvgl [i0.2, 2007-07-17]
Abgr 1: Pbzcvyrf haqre Ivfhny Fghqvb naq t++.
Abgr 2: Jvaqbjf rkrphgnoyr vapyhqrq.
Abgr 3: TAH Yvahk rkrphgnoyr vapyhqrq.
Hey! It works!
Why do I keep getting 42?
when I think of random numbers, I can't help but remember the 'fishbowl' that had at SGI (mtn view) where an indycam was photo'ing some lavalamps and creating random seeds based on those images.
ah, SGI....
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Hasn't random.org done this for a while already? Perhaps they don't have academic backing, but I do believe they use numbers generated by atomic decay.
True random number generators have been around in hardware form for a while based on a number of different processes, not quantum only. But this is being offered to the community at large, who may not have the means to procure or pay for a hardware solution.
This is neat but there have been other quantum random number generators online for years. This one by id Quantique springs to mind... I'm not sure what this new service provides that others don't. If you REALLY want secure random numbers you should buy a QRNG PCI card and make them yourself so you're the only one with a copy.
Atmospheric noise
Lava lamps
Radioactive decay
Entropy
Call me paranoid, but I think I'd rather use a local pseudo random number generator than an external true random generator. My security concerns associated with using a local pseudo random number generator are outweighed by my privacy concerns of contacting a third party every time I want to establish a SSH connection or use my credit card online.
Great for research though, of course.
I've been waiting on this for a long time.
--- JurassicPizza
Look at the signup page. You not only need to prove that you are a human but also that you have elementary knowledge of calculus.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
I keep getting 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0...
Beware of MITM attacks!
For scientific research, there's a very good reason to use pseudo-random numbers: reproducibility.
If you're analyzing a stochastic model, you want to be able to generate lots of runs with different random sequences and gather statistics from the ensemble. But if you see interesting behavior in a particular run and want to take a closer look, you want to be able to go back and run it again, exactly as it happened the first time. In this case, you don't want real randomness, you want pseudo-randomness with good statistical properties. I'm currently checking through my code to make sure you can do just that when using this tool.
"Random" is a word used when an event has too many unknowns to reasonably no the outcome.
To use a very simple random event: Flipping a coin.
If you know all the variables, you will know what the outcome will be.
How heavy is the coin? what side is up at the moment of the flip? whats the air density? how hard was it flipped? etc. . .
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Great, now you're going to get yourself sued by the MPAA for randomly guessing their new encryption key!
lavarand
A similar LGPL implementation: LavaRnd
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
If you need to repeat the random series, why don't you just store the numbers in a file?
Because with pseudo-random seeds, I do. I store the 1000 seeds and run it 10,000 iterations on each run. If I were to store each random number, I'd have to store 10,000,000 numbers in my file rather than 1000. I'll always store them, but the question is whether it takes 1000 records or 10,000,000. For academic purposes, the results aren't statistically different, so why store more numbers?
Learn to love Alaska
I just checksum my Windows registry.
It's random enough for my purposes.
http://web.archive.org/web/20011027002011/http://d ilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert20 01182781025.gif
[Tour of Accounting]
Accounting Troll: "Over here we have our random number generator"
Number Generator Troll: "Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine"
Dilbert: "Are you sure that's random?"
Accounting Troll: "That's the problem with randomness: you can never be sure"
As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."
So in other words there really is *no* hope that web 2.0 will actually produce anything truly outstanding?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
My number's bigger than your number...
No sig today...
The intuitive disconnect here is that humans have a well-documented inability to understand or true randomness. By true randomness, I mean in a mathematical sense: uniformly distributed values over some range, with each value independent from the next (uncorrelated). Just try it: whatever you come up with, whether it be some algorithm, hardware, whatever — it will probably fail all the statistical tests for true randomness. And if it can't pass those tests, then it will be useless for most of the applications that one needs random things for... simulations, encryption, authentication, etc. And mind you, even if one can pass all the existing tests with some method, it doesn't mean that someone will invent a new statistical test tomorrow that the method will fail spectacularly. Like many apparently simple problems, random number generation is surprisingly deep and very, very difficult to do right.
[B.v.L]
These are all pure mathematical algorithms. Nowhere in any of these is there any sort of pre-generated random lookup tables. (Unless you count the S-boxes used in some block ciphers with Fortuna.) Pre-generated "random" lookup tables only hide poor randomness in the generation process and don't actually improve the situation cryptographically at all; I suspect that for most other applications there would be problems as well. If your generated numbers don't cover the entire domain space uniformly, then they still won't no matter how many lookup tables you use to transform them.
According to the article, people are sitting around rolling dice to generate random number sequences. Really? REALLY?!? Who wrote this article?
[BvL]