Seems like a waste of energy... I can imagine putting a weather station on the roof would be more useful (albeit less cool). Use multiple sensors for rainfall, UV, wind speed, wind direction, temperature, pressure and aggregate the signals from each... Surely the combination of localized weather readings would provide enough randomness.
A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
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Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#72Seems like a waste of energy... I can imagine putting a weather station on the roof would be more useful (albeit less cool). Use multiple sensors for rainfall, UV, wind speed, wind direction, temperature, pressure and aggregate the signals from each... Surely the combination of localized weather readings would provide enough randomness.
It's ~100 lamps for entropy that covers ~10% of the internet, energy consumption is a ridiculous complaint.
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#73SGI did it first
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#74If you can't afford that many lava lamps, NIST provides an alternative, free service: https://beacon.nist.gov/home
WARNING: DO NOT USE BEACON GENERATED VALUES AS SECRET CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEYS.
So probably not a good idea.
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
For sure. In another office they use a geiger counter (a much more standard way to get randomness, and probably easier to setup). That said, this doubles as a public art installation in their lobby - something many companies spend thousands (or millions!) of dollars on. So it's not just PR, it's actually surprisingly practical.
If it was a public art installation, wouldn't that leak their entropy?
You’d have to get a picture in the exact same angle, which is unlikely.
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#76If you can't afford that many lava lamps, NIST provides an alternative, free service: https://beacon.nist.gov/home
WARNING: DO NOT USE BEACON GENERATED VALUES AS SECRET CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEYS. So probably not a good idea.
Using the values directly is not the same thing as feeding the values into a RNG.
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#77So how many bits does it produce per second per lamp?
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
For sure. In another office they use a geiger counter (a much more standard way to get randomness, and probably easier to setup). That said, this doubles as a public art installation in their lobby - something many companies spend thousands (or millions!) of dollars on. So it's not just PR, it's actually surprisingly practical.
Geiger counter might happen to be very vulnerable to collocated attacks. Overwhelm counter with non-random radiation, compromise a batch of keys produced during the burst,
Are you suggesting a gamma ray beam? Or neutron beam? (You couldn't do an alpha particle beam - that's stopped by a sheet of paper... and the beta particle ray would have difficulty with the building construction).
This then goes to the question of "where are you getting a focused gamma ray beam that has sufficient rate that you're able to modulate the period between two detection events?"
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#79My lesson from my personal experiments with Lavarand: you must have more than one lamp, not necessarily for more entropy, but for fail-over and uptime. At approximately ~30 hours, my vintage 70's lamp 'gives up' - the fluid temperature becomes pretty even between the bottom and the top. It's all essentially superheated as far as the wax is concerned and it simply stays in one place as a dome at the bottom, barely mov…
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Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#80That's approximately 100 lava lamps each at 100W = 10,000W = 10kW/h * 20.4 cents = $2.04/h * 24 = $48.96/day $1,489.20/month.
Ignoring the fact that is very little money in Silicon Valley. Lava lamps consume a large amount of electricity in order to generate the heat they need. There are cheaper better ways to generate randomness, this is purely for spectacle clearly.
It makes me nervous more than anything. If that's the front they put up, inside is there a Rube Goldberg machine that triggers DDoS protection?