Physicists Turn 8MP Smartphone Camera Into a Quantum Random Number Generator

KentuckyFC writes: "Random numbers are the lifeblood of many cryptographic systems and demand for them will only increase in the coming years as techniques such as quantum cryptography become mainstream. But generating genuinely random numbers is a tricky business, not least because it cannot be done with a deterministic process such as a computer program. Now physicists have worked out how to use a smartphone camera to generate random numbers using quantum uncertainties. The approach is based on the fact that the emission of a photon is a quantum process that is always random. So in a given unit of time, a light emitter will produce a number of photons that varies by a random amount. Counting the number of photons gives a straightforward way of generating random numbers. The team points out that the pixels in smartphone cameras are now so sensitive that they can pick up this kind of quantum variation. And since a camera has many pixels working in parallel, a single image can generate large quantities of random digits. The team demonstrates the technique in a proof-of principle experiment using the 8-megapixel camera on a Nokia N9 smartphone while taking images of a green LED. The result is a quantum random number generator capable of producing digits at the rate of 1 megabit per second. That's more than enough for most applications and raises the prospect of credit card transactions and encrypted voice calls from an ordinary smartphone that are secured by the laws of quantum physics."

Comments

Re:Seed

[Anonymous Coward]

42

This story is a dup

[TFlan91]

Because he failed to give any links...

http://www.lavarnd.org/ - Was the site linked in story below, but is now dead

Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/project...

http://slashdot.org/story/03/0...

Re:This story is a dup

[timeOday]

I am not so sure the randomness from that project actually came from the quantum properties of the photons themselves. A saturated CCD may be a chaotic physical process, but (I think) the dynamics of that chaotic process are properties of that CCD, not directly from the actions of individual photons which are known to be "quantum" and truly random.

You can never be sure...

[tippe]

Oblig. Dilbert Reference