Exploiting Network Captures For Truer Randomness

First time accepted submitter ronaldm writes "As a composer who uses computers for anything and everything from engraving to live performance projects, it's periodically of some concern that computers do exactly what they're supposed to do — what they're told. Introducing imperfections into music to make it sound more 'natural' is nothing new: yet it still troubles me that picking up random data from /dev/random to do this is well, cheating. It's not random. It bugs me. So, short of bringing in and using an atomic source, here's a way to embrace natural randomness — and bring your packet captures to life!"

Comments

not nearly as "random" as /dev/random

[Dahamma]

/dev/random on most OS'ed these days uses an entropy pool generated from a bunch of different sources - timing of keystrokes, mouse movements, disk seeking - and yes, network information. Then it uses cryptographic hashes on those.

Your implementation basically uses one of those entropy sources, and then doesn't even hash it...

Re:If I would

[JabberWokky]

Actually, many people would sell you the answer. And they don't have nobel-prices[sic].

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator for an overview of the devices you're looking for.