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Researchers Devise a Way To Generate Provably Random Numbers Using Quantum Mechanics (newatlas.com)
No random number generator you've ever used is truly, provably random. Until now, that is. Researchers have used an experiment developed to test quantum mechanics to generate demonstrably random numbers, which could come in handy for encryption. From a report: The method uses photons to generate a string of random ones and zeros, and leans on the laws of physics to prove that these strings are truly random, rather than merely posing as random. The researchers say their work could improve digital security and cryptography. The challenge for existing random number generators is not only creating truly random numbers, but proving that those numbers are random. "It's hard to guarantee that a given classical source is really unpredictable," says Peter Bierhorst, a mathematician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where this research took place. "Our quantum source and protocol is like a fail-safe. We're sure that no one can predict our numbers." For example, random number algorithms often rely on a source of data which may ultimately prove predictable, such as atmospheric noise. And however complex the algorithm, it's still applying consistent rules. Despite these potential imperfections, these methods are relied on in the day-to-day encryption of data. This team's method, however, makes use of the properties of quantum mechanics, or what Einstein described as "spooky action at a distance." Further reading: Wired, LiveScience, and CNET.
Mostly just for the random entertainment value: https://www.random.org/
int getRandomNumber() // chosen from random post number
{
return 1;
}
You're not fooling me. It's well known that the NSA incorporated backdoors into the fabric of the universe when they subverted the big bang.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
int getRandom() { // generated by dice roll
return 4;
}
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
See Lava Rand
I would have thought thermal noise in a resistor or semiconductor (which is in itself generated by subatomic so quantum, events) would be just as random.
So we do have free will after all.
I'm missing the proof that there are no non-local hidden-variables or super-deterministic local hidden variables at play.
It has already been established that thermal/shot component noise (most commonly from reversed diodes) is demonstrably statistically random and is based on quantum electrodynamic events.
TRNGs (True Random Number Generators) using this principle have been around for a while embedded in some hardware such as the Intel 82802 firmware hub found on some Intel mainboards
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Observe time between a decay and the next one. Do this twice. Next bit is comparison between the two times. This method is as old as quantum mechanics itself.
Is 1 less random than 29840972.58792384 ?
Perhaps they mean "randomly generate numbers"?
Ted Stevens, is that you??
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
Nice, I can finally upgrade my lava lamp entropy source to a quantum source that uses laser light on a crystal. Why? Because /dev/urandom is for peasants.
Ted Stevens is not a truck
all the Three Letter Agencies around the world decided to scramble resources to determine if they could identify any form of structure underlying the quantum nature of the universe being leveraged to support this [P]RNG technique - and in so doing discovered a layer of structure or order that underpins the quantum realm.
Let's face it, when you consider the budgets these TLAs get to play with, they must be orders of magnitude more than theoretical physicists and mathematicians - and we already know that the NSA has more PhD mathematicians than anywhere else... They might actually manage a much better crack at it than the physics labs...
If a series of numbers favors one result, then it is non-random.
A true, pure, random series of numbers will naturally gravitate towards equal representation of all options as the set continues to grow (though will have very unequal distributions over any small subset). This is a logical consequence of what random means. It makes zero sense to point to an even distribution over a large set as proof that something is non-random. It is exactly backwards, in fact.
In ten years: "New advances in quantum computing will let us predict earlier thought to be random sequences."
physicsworld: How to make a quantum random-number generator from a mobile phone
I have devised a much cheaper solution. Flip a 1 cent coin. Boom. Alert the Nobel prize committee.
However, this is really no different than other mathematical proofs.
No, it is very different from a mathematical proof. This proof relies on our understanding of quantum mechanics and photons. Mathematical proofs are far more fundamental in that they are true regardless of the properties of the universe you happen to be in at the time. That being said QM is one of the most accurately tested scientific laws there has ever been but, nevertheless, if an experiment tomorrow shows that it is wrong this "proof" might come crashing down.
governments suppressing their people, electric grid is very exposed to both humans hacking
You know that requires random numbers right, large quantities that even if humans where good at generating random numbers they wouldn't be able to do fast enough.
But humans are terrible at generating random numbers, say to someone pick a number and my guess is it will generally be between 1 and 10, and whole. Even then there I the distribution will not be even. https://www.education.com/scie...
Even if the measurements produce true random values, how does one eliminate bias converting these measurements to bits ? Obtaining a driftless zero bias from measuring physical quantities is normally next to impossible.
Can we use this result to prove that our reality is not a computer simulation (e.g. that we live in reality prime)?
What about the giant wall of lava lamps that is used to generate random numbers..?
"We do not understand how it works" is not the same as "provable random numbers". Any proof here comes with "if quantum theory is exact". Now, it is known that Quantum Theory and Relativity are inconsistent, yet both are exceptionally well verified. It is therefore exceptionally likely that Quantum Theory is not an exact model of reality. Incidentally, it is not possible to prove that any specific bit of data is "random" either, Mathematics does not allow that and Physics even less so.
Also, just use a standard, decades old Zener or reversed-PN noise generator and get a significant amount of quantum noise in there for $10 or so in total.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That you won't know its random till you look at it.
bool isPosterAProvableIdiot = poster.displayName == “sexconker”;
Prove me wrong, dipshit.
I guess you never played hangman with a blood lust. Adversarial randomness, it's a thing. Eventually you reach a game-theoretic equilibria. The equilibria will never assign a probability of zero to any password.
Your underlying mental model here is that this is a multiplayer game, with a large group of guppies, a smaller group of porcupines, and some community of crackers.
New rule: guppies don't understand porcupines.
New rule: guppies barely understand crackers.
So the guppies will end up at a game-theoretic solution which is far from an optimal strategy.
New rule: the crackers don't know the guppies from the porcupines when starting to crack a new password.
So the crackers will adopt a hybrid strategy to maximize crack rate based the population of guppies and the population of porcupines. No matter what strategy the crackers adopt, the guppies basically amount to a fixed point. This also means that the crackers will prioritize exploration of the guppy ghetto ("God", "password", "12345678", etc.) regardless of how the porcupines behave.
From the cracker perspective all the non-randomness derives from the guppy population. Asymptotically, as the guppy population shrinks, the porcupines will adopt a uniform distribution over the entire password space.
Essentially, porcupines avoiding "password" only looks less random if you advertise that you're a porcupine to the cracker population. If they really take you seriously, they wouldn't bother to check "password" early (advertised porcupines would be presumed to use a fully random password).
But it costs nearly nothing to check your bluff by running the list of the one trillion most common passwords, and this whole Dr Strangelove "tell them" strategy presumes 100% of the crackers actually notice your "I'm a porcupine" disclosure.
If any of the crackers fail to notice (and to automatically take your disclosure seriously), you don't want to be using "password" at all, ever.
Why is the game-theoretic embedding so intricate?
Because the first trillion (or first trillion trillion) most-common passwords are numerically insignificant in a 60-bit password space.
So avoiding "password" & co. doesn't dent your entropy in any digit anyone would ever bother to write down, and the whole story I've just told is asymptotic to a distinction without a difference.
In summary: no, the entropy goes up when porcupines filter out non-starters, as measured from the appropriate game-theoretic node (crackers who are locked into the strategy of not distinguishing porcupines from guppies before the attack begins).
Here's a second-order asymptote to wrap this up: if the cracker really, really believes that you are a maximal porcupine (you're a fully-upgraded positronic borg descendant of Colin Percival or Moxie Marlinspike, with the factory anti-tamper sticker on your emotion chip in pristine nano-crystalline condition) then the cracker doesn't test a single password at all with a classical computer: it would be attojoule wasted to no conceivable economic upside.
For the cracker to be stuck with a classical computer, time travel would probably be involved, and the cracker would be stuck in some prehistoric nowhereville using the mouse, instead of talking to it, or merely holding it to his forehead.
But hey, it could happen, so a true porcupine needs to be prepared.
Wikipedia has a list of available hardware random number generators from $7 on up. The ones that use direct quantum randomness seem to start at about a thousand euros, the cheaper ones using forms of noise. There isn't any way to predict atmospheric noise, since we're talking about a chaotic system that deals with interactions small enough that the uncertainty principle isn't completely swamped.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
True randomness is there for sure, but making it unbiased is another matter. Real systems interact with their environments, and those environments can change the results in subtle ways. Small imperfections in the apparatus can create correlations between the photons, for example (simple example: magnetic fields cause photon polarizations to rotate). And correlations between random values are really nasty for random number generation. I'd be really reluctant to trust the output of such a random number generator directly.
Still, if this is used as a seed to a cryptographically-secure pseudo-random number generator, then it's probably fine. Expensive, though.
lol shut up retard
You are absolutely correct. The fact that we express everything with probability functions means that we don't understand the underlying phenomenon at this time. I have hope that progress will be made, but to claim that entanglement as we understand it today is the last word is horribly short-sighted.
This article is hype for Peter Bierhorst. Clients of NIST, both foreign and domestic, are seeking truly random numbers to make fairness decisions. One example of a fairness decision is a court trial that wants to randomly pick a judge in a case to show fairness to both sides of the case.
This article proposes using photons to determine ones and zeros. The underlying theory behind the photon experiment applies the Bell test to prove randomness of photons. The problem is, there are many types of Bell tests. One of those tests has to be chosen over the others to prove randomness. Then, to prove randomness, a statistical test has to be performed to prove randomness within acceptable ranges of probability.
Whether you flip coins, roll dice, listen to white noise, test photons, or generate ones and zeros with an algorithm, you still have to run the same statistical test to prove randomness. Any deviation from a norm is explained as random deviation within the parameters of your test. It is possible, but very unlikely, to have one million random zeros in a row in a random experiment. Just as unlikely, are one million random ones, or any other pattern of one million ones and zeros.
Peter Bierhorst and others at NIST wish to develop credibility of their random number generator by using hotly debated and complex experiments in physics. Go for it, Peter, and the others on your team.
But for the rest of us, understand that the random numbers produced at NIST are based on mathematics, just as much as the results of flipping coins and rolling dice. We can produce random ones and zeros more quickly and at less cost than Peter can, and we still use the same math as he does to justify our results.
I just don't have confidence in some new unproven, probably un-scrutinized and being some obscure piece of technology involving quantum mechanics that security researchers can only verify based on hearsay, as they probably don't enough about physics or advanced math.
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I am a physicist who worked on this project at NIST, so I am sorry to be late to this conversation. A lot of the comments here express doubt or uncertainty about what is new or different in our quantum random number generator compared to others like thermal-electronic noise, lava lamps, random.org, and others. This a great question, because the news article linked at the top of the thread does not explain this well. Maybe I can help.
The key idea is that our randomness is "device independent", meaning that the justification for the unpredictability of its output does not rely on characterization of the devices. Instead it is based on the observable data and a few other surprisingly weak assumptions.
One mode of operation for our random number source is to transform a public randomness into private randomness. At the center of our experiment is a "Bell Test", also known as a "test of local realism". During the Bell Test each member of a pair of entangled photons is sent to a measurement station. At the two stations, a choice is made for a measurement to perform on its photon. We assume that those choices are independent of all other aspects of the experiment, and they are unpredictable by any adversary. They could be provided by a public random source, such as the NIST Randomness Beacon. The two measurement events are space-like separated, so the measurement choice at one station cannot be communicated to the other station (unless it can travel faster than light, which we assume is impossible). We then do a statistical analysis of the choices and the photon detection events. The statistical analysis proves that the photon detections could not have been generated by "hidden variables". Instead the detections are genuinely unpredictable and random. It is important to understand that the statistical analysis is done using only the record of choices and detections. To justify the fact that the measurement stations cannot communicate we also need to know the distance separating them and the times of the measurements. The record of photon detections is now our private random string.
No detailed knowledge of the photon source, detectors, or other devices is needed. In fact these devices might have been built by an adversary who wants to predict or learn our private randomness. We assume that the adversary has no advance knowledge of the public random source used for the measurement choices. We also assume that once the devices are in our laboratory, the adversary cannot communicate with them and maintains no quantum entanglement with them. Lastly, we assume that the classical computers used to process data are reliable and secure. Although we use quantum physics to create the entangled photons, the proof of randomness does not assume that quantum physics is true. The data analysis itself proves that no classical source (such as an adversary's look-up table secretly implanted in our devices) could have produced the observed data.
The next generation of this experiment will be able to perform private randomness expansion, in which a short private string is used to make measurement choices, and a longer private random string is generated by the Bell Test. We are also working to provide security even if the experimental devices maintain quantum entanglement with an adversary once they are secured in our laboratory.
I am happy to answer other questions about this work, if anyone is interested.
There is no such thing as a truly random number.
ALL outcomes of any algorithm will be reliant of the state of the constituent components;
actual states and those relative to their environment and (neighbors).
If you can duplicate those exact states and circumstances, you will get the same number.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.