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.

Comments

why is this needed?

[slashmydots]

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?

Re:why is this needed?

[ledow]

Because paying for cards for every machine in the word, and mandating their use for every transaction from any machine, plus avoiding that device being compromised by a government entity, or turned into a TPM module is difficult enough.

Seriously, imagine if your bank's said, to comply with PCI DSS standards, you had to install this special card in your server.

1) That's enforced server downtime.
2) Most servers are virtual nowadays and not actually physical (and thus you can't guarantee that that "PCI card" your computer sees is even a real PCI card)
3) Are you going to trust a random piece of government- or even bank-mandated hardware in your machine reading the entire memory bus?

Nobody would touch it, even in the server-arena, let alone "every client in the world".

There are already lots of "random number generator" hardwares, everything from white-noise microphones to random instructions inside chips based on quantum noise (now obsolete and nobody really used them, except VIA chips). Nobody touched them. Where it matters, hardware exists to make it happen. Few use it.

Mandating it to every client or even every SSL-using server? Good luck. It just doesn't provide an advantage. Even those places with SSL accelerators (that just offload SSL transactions kind of like a reverse proxy) don't use them.

And the fact is that almost every weakness so far is not in the choice of random numbers but in the way those random numbers are handled later on. Except for embedded boards and no-permanent-state devices (which you should realise shouldn't be used for this kind of thing), filling up the entropy pool on any modern, network connected machine is pretty trivial.

Re: why is this needed?

[Dr_Barnowl]

You don't need special magic entropy cards, there's entropy all around most computers in the form of white noise - just use randomsound. Solves the problem on most laptops because they have a built in mic.

Re: why is this needed?

[geek]

Entropy is a problem in VM's, especially when they don't have actual devices attached.

Current Opportunity

[andrewbaldwin]

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

White Noise

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:pseudo+pseudo=true?

[gweihir]

No. The title is bullshit. This is about generating very hard to predict pseudo-random numbers, because you have to guess a large, distributed state and distributed seeding values.

As there is zero need for "true random" numbers in crypto (you only need "not guessable fro an attacker"), this is still a significant improvement.

Side note: Whenever something "mainstream" reports about random number generation, they get it wrong. It seems that non-experts routinely have no clue what is important here and what not. As for crypto, the philosophical question what "random" means is completely immaterial. Crypto just cares whether an attacker can somehow find out the "random" number or not and how difficult it is if it is possible. There is no need for "true" random numbers anywhere in crypto.

I prefer accelerometer based RNG

[rebelwarlock]

"Shake laptop to generate private key."