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CU Randomness Beacon
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: CU Randomness Beacon
#22The source of their randomness is interesting, as someone not well-versed in physics: https://random.colorado.edu/concepts/traceable-randomness
Re: CU Randomness Beacon
#23Imagine the terrors of multiple government agencies synchronizing ID selection to an identical source of randomness. Congrats, you won jury duty, a tax audit AND selective service!
Re: CU Randomness Beacon
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because, firstly, this is a university, not some rando self-hosting, and secondly, you can't generate randomness from any classical computer, only pseudorandomness [0]. This means that a dedicated adversary can potentially work out what the outcome will be. For something like the use cases they mention - jury selection, lottery, etc. - you want actual randomness. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness
> […] you can't generate randomness from any classical computer, only pseudorandomness [0]. Back in 1999 Intel used amplified thermal noise from analog circuits on their chips to generate randomness: * PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20100714102630/https://www.crypt... This was further refined and in 2011 they published how RdRand (formerly "Bull Mountain") works: * https://spectrum.ieee.org/behind-intels-new-random…
I think you could just create something like this and sample it with the sound card as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chua%27s_circuit
Re: CU Randomness Beacon
#25Things like these are absolutely idiotic. Every single computer, be it a laptop or desktop or a phone, are able to produce randomness. Why in the hell would you trust a random website?
Ever taken a stats class? Recall the "table of random values" in the back of the book? That's why
Re: CU Randomness Beacon
#26Things like these are absolutely idiotic. Every single computer, be it a laptop or desktop or a phone, are able to produce randomness. Why in the hell would you trust a random website?
Because, firstly, this is a university, not some rando self-hosting, and secondly, you can't generate randomness from any classical computer, only pseudorandomness [0]. This means that a dedicated adversary can potentially work out what the outcome will be. For something like the use cases they mention - jury selection, lottery, etc. - you want actual randomness. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness
A zener diode- standard component- produces random noise. It needs to be mildly conditioned to be unbiased.
Re: CU Randomness Beacon
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> […] you can't generate randomness from any classical computer, only pseudorandomness [0]. Back in 1999 Intel used amplified thermal noise from analog circuits on their chips to generate randomness: * PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20100714102630/https://www.crypt... This was further refined and in 2011 they published how RdRand (formerly "Bull Mountain") works: * https://spectrum.ieee.org/behind-intels-new-random…
> So classical computers can generate randomness if you have the right circuits for it. That is by definition not a classical computer. It's not a quantum computer, but it's probabilistic in a limited sense.
I don't think anybody wrote a description of a classical computer that excludes components that generate harvestable random noise. Effectively all computers are probabilistic, it's just that the probabilities for instructions, memory fetches, bus transfers, etc, have such low error probabilities that you will likely go years without directly observing one.
Re: CU Randomness Beacon
#28Things like these are absolutely idiotic. Every single computer, be it a laptop or desktop or a phone, are able to produce randomness. Why in the hell would you trust a random website?
The idea here is that it's a public, traceable generation of random numbers. So, if the two of us wanted to flip a coin to settle a disagreement, we could agree on some future value of this beacon (unknowable to us at the moment) to use as the source of entropy, then let one of us choose heads or tails, telling the other person what we chose. Then we wait until the agreed time, check the beacon, and boom, a fair coin toss, which we can be fairly certain wasn't manipulated by either of us.
Re: CU Randomness Beacon
#29Verifiable quantum randomness sounds interesting - https://drand.love is another verifiable randomness beacon, though using more traditional cryptography
Re: CU Randomness Beacon
#30Imagine the terrors of multiple government agencies synchronizing ID selection to an identical source of randomness. Congrats, you won jury duty, a tax audit AND selective service!
One would want to use something like HKDF[1] to create derived values with domain separation.