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

What the cluck?

[YodasEvilTwin]

Network captures do not embody "natural randomness". Packets are produced by computers too, not by the entropy of the universe or something. This guy has toked a little too much ganja. They're probably not even as random as a regular pseudorandom number generator. The latter makes some guarantees with regards to what you'll get out and ensures that no basic patterns are present. Network captures don't have these features. Depending on the computer, the network, and so on the incoming packets may be quite deliberate and ordered.

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:not nearly as "random" as /dev/random

[gman003]

In brief:

"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."

Anyone trying to create a new random number generator with the intent of producing more random numbers, without an extensive and specialized education, is guaranteed to fail.

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.