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Tor To Use Distributed RNG To Generate Truly Random Numbers (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Softpedia: Tor developers have been working on the next iteration of the Tor network and its underbelly, the Onion routing protocol, in order to create a stronger, harder-to-crack anonymous communications system. To advance the project, the developer team schedules brainstorming and planning meetings at regular intervals. The most recent of these meetings took place last week, in Montreal, Canada. In this session, the team tested the next generation of the Tor network working on top of a revamped Onion protocol that uses a new algorithm for generating random numbers, never before seen on the Internet. The Tor Project says it created something it calls "a distributed RNG" (random number generator) that uses two or more computers to create random numbers and then blends their outputs together into a new random number. The end result is something that's almost impossible to crack without knowing which computers from a network contributed to the final random number, and which entropy each one used. Last week, two University of Texas academics have made a breakthrough in random number generation. The work is theoretical, but could lead to a number of advances in cryptography, scientific polling, and the study of various complex environments such as the climate.
Can two pseudo random numbers actually be combined to give a truly random number?
Why doesn't Tor have a network time-sync ability, a la NTP?
Why are people still complaining about random numbers? Over 10 years ago I saw a documentary that showed off a quantum photon splitter PCI card that could go in any computer. The API let you generate random numbers based on splitting photons left or right and it was deemed closer to 50% each side than any other randomizing system ever invented. So...what happened to that? Doing quantum tasks with photons is actually relatively easy so the story was believable. I can't think of a better way in the physical universe to generate random numbers. So besides the problem of requiring volunteers running relays to have one of these custom piece of hardware, why don't they attempt to use this solution?
Just use the daily finance / economic forecasts and predictions of the impacts on personal budgets, jobs, immigration.... that are being spouted by both sides of the current BREXIT** debate.
This can be generalised to any politician's promises but the current round are particularly egregious.
** Referendum for UK to leave/remain in the EU
I ran into entropy problems when signing a lot of JAR files in a build process - turns out modern computers with their large RAM that caches disk etc don't generate as much entropy as they used to.
The solution I used was the randomsound daemon, which samples white noise from your mic to inject into your entropy pool.
Why not just use that? There's a crapload of white noise in most server rooms, even near most consumer PCs (just tape a mic next to one of the cooling vents). Actual genuine entropy rather than this card-shuffled pseudo entropy - making things complex just obscures things further, it doesn't really create randomness.
So distributing the PRNG among a number of trusted contributors and then mixing the results might improve the entropy, and arguably increases amount of trust you can have in the randomness of the results, but it doesn't mean that it isn't non-deterministic and "truly" random.
Is it a fairly decent improvement over the way TOR currently generates random number? Sure! Is it a smart idea? Absolutely! Is it actually random? Hell no!
Right. Because Tor users are so trustworthy I'm going to trust a network of assholes not to give me shit entropy sources.
nsa will just develop fake tor nodes that spike the rng to cripple it... it'll be worse
Someone putting a number of RNG systems onto TOR so they control providing the "random" number.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"...that uses a new algorithm for generating random numbers, never before seen on the Internet."
That should start ringing alarm bells right there.
Are they certain that using a local RNG is a source of vulnerability? Has /dev/random suddenly become predictable? What evidence do they have for this assertion?
Are they not just swapping a lock that's been secure for decades for a brand shiny new one of unknown strength because it's new and has a cool paper and they fancied coding something hip and fresh?
That alone warrant that it will never be a consumer product, unless provided ad-hoc on main boards. Remember tor is used by normal average consumer (with respect of using such specialized hardware).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
In the world of crypto, I'd much rather be using something that's been around long enough to be thoroughly analysed. Every so often someone pops up with something new and exciting and different, then six months later gets shot down by the experts who describe exactly how to break it.
Telling us "even the authors can't predict what will come out of it" doesn't raise my confidence, either. I'd be a lot happier with a statement like "rigorous analysis shows that the random numbers generated will be uniformly distributed", or something like that.
Real crypto work is hard, and random number generation is part of the hard.
What happened to "Randomize timer"?
If they compound all these together, aren't they going to push the useful range of the randomized number into a small subpopulation centered on the mean via CLT?
"Shake laptop to generate private key."
Now, you can sabotage the randomness of the underlying crypto by breaking random number generation on any one of two computers. Alternatively, you can MITM attack one of the computers random number generation which was previously impossible because of thoroughly on-board RNG algorithms.
In a few years, most computers will have an RDRAND. It is not clear how good AMD is with this instruction and there are rumors about Intel having backdoors into the internals of RDRAND in some manner. There are some people who do not believe this is a good source for random numbers for other reasons, but you can always include that and possibly post-processing for your pseudo-random number algorithm.
What the hell is a distributed ranger?
Sent from FF XI.
42
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
Ian Ameline
I had the idea to create a transparent pressure sensitive skin and cover the windshield of my car with it. An onboard computer reads the impact of each insect - the hash of the x/y and pressure of the hit is then hashed and the result is used as the next seed value for a mersenne twister based rng.
My parents had gotten the conference calling feature with our new phone service, and my friends and I decided to try a pen and paper RPG session over the phone, instead of having to meet up at one person's house. We ran into an obstacle with the dice rolls. The players wanted to make their own dice rolls - they felt that their characters' fate should be in their hands and thus they should be the ones to roll the dice. I was GM and worried that players would cheat on the dice rolls if I couldn't see the dice.
At first I tried having them making a bunch of pre-rolls. I would write down the results, and could go down the list every time a roll was needed. They complained this wasn't interactive enough. Apparently part of the thrill of the game for them was knowing they needed to make a good roll when their character was in a bad situation. The pre-rolls destroyed that aspect of the game for them - no more tension as to whether or not the dice would save them.
After some more thought, I had them roll a die and tell me the result. Then I flipped a coin. Heads, their die roll stood. Tails I used 7 minus their die roll (we were playing Traveller, which only used d6), which inverted the result of their roll. They got the satisfaction of controlling their own fate by rolling their own dice, and I was satisfied there was no cheating going on.
And you should care why
Yes, just like ALL philosophical questions, isn't that right?
We just need to get our job done and then EVERYTHING is just fine! We don't have to worry about anything else, ever. Curiosity killed the cat. Blinders on, job done, life good. This is how our ancestors went from common apes to homo sapiens. And anyway, what makes it doesn't keep it!
Or you could not be fucking retarded.
It may be tempting to go with the flow, but the tradeoff is the loss of your humanity: that which made us human, that which makes us human: true curiosity, imagination, and critical thought.
The truest definition of "random" is "originating from dimensions beyond comprehension", but the common feeling of what "random" means is covered in several layers of ignorance over this. The problem with that is that the ability of people to comprehend generally varies wildly and this ability is always being improved secretly. So it's really a useless idea, and as with all useless things that get used, it is very detrimental.
Everything comes from something else.
This idea is absolutely the central pillar of THE MEANING OF LIFE: uncovering the particular dimensions that give existence to the things that please your senses and consciousness and understanding them and then in turn uncovering the particular dimensions comprising those and so on. This is the origin of true power. Everything that everyone has ever done is an attempt to follow this principle.
Unfortunately when most people are unable, after thorough investigation, to justify particular aspects of themselves in terms of finer dimensions they rarely draw the conclusion that that aspect of themselves is false and detrimental. This is because their emotion overwhelms their reason. This phenomenon is caused by the lack of resources which make a human most human: generally; freedom. This is the origin of the lesser kind of power that dominates our lives today.
I mean who can really disagree with this? It's the truth that rams you in the face every day, but how often do you take it by the horns?
Hardware RNGs are like 50 bucks. Wikipedia even has a compare page, and you can go higher if you need to. It is unusual to need a shockingly large amount of random bits to begin with, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So this TOR thing is nice, especially because computers baseline can generate psuedorandom numbers pretty darned quickly, and merging them is better than not merging them. But if you, personally, care, using a hardware RNG and having it seed and combine with your prng (such as Linux will do) seems like it is ideal.
No shit Sherlock. No devs of any RNG should be able to predict the output when it's in the deployed. And Tor devs is not a team of Avengers.
Yes, real crypto is hard, but do you understand why one time pads are proven to be unbeatable, when used correctly? It is because correctly combining a source that can't be distiguished from random with a completely nonrandom message produces something that can't be distinguished from random either. With binary data a simple bitwise XOR already has this effect. If any of the sources has a bit the attacker can't predict in a certain position the resulting XOR'ed bit in that position can't be predicted by the attacker either. That is why the result of combining several sources of random data is as least as reliable as the best source, It does not degrade to the weakest source, it does the opposite.
People keep talking about getting the "perfect" random number. Since when is the random number the weakest link in security?
Just throw some mouse, keyboard, microphone input into your pseudorandom number generator, and it's impractical to break.
I believe that every town should have their own entropy source. It should probably be an offline source. Where the citizens can come and obtain large amounts of entropy onto say a DVD or USB stick. This source should be protected by armed authorities. Our leaders and lawmakers should be working to empower individuals with high security and best practices to ensure individual privacy. This is the type of government I want.