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The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
21–30 of 62 posts
Re: The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
#22article has a section dedicated to "how to obtain starting seed" with a list of examples and somehow fails to include wall of lava lamps in said list of examples
They kind of do if you play 6 degrees of wikipedia...
The 'hardware random number generator' link in the list in the article goes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generat..., and then in the see also section on that article there's a link to the page for a different lava lamp wall, with a photo of the cloudflare one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand
Re: The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
#23They don't actually do anything, but I think it's hard to tell a story where they make things worse, given that Cloudflare is a cryptographically competent org. It's just getting mixed into the already-secure conventional CSPRNG they're using (almost certainly: just the Linux kernel RNG).
> I think it's hard to tell a story where they make things worse [...] mixed into the [...] CSPRNG
I think it's easy to tell a story where it's slightly worse. I mean, for any budget of storage bits and CPU cycles, any "inferior" random data necessarily pushes out "better" stuff.
Re: The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
#24article has a section dedicated to "how to obtain starting seed" with a list of examples and somehow fails to include wall of lava lamps in said list of examples
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Re: The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
#25Nothing is random enough for an arbitrary audience. There's always the possibility that some alien spaceship will land and some creature will emerge, take a glance at your RNG, and say: "next one's 6598489811, try it" and they'll be right.
We can only say that something is random enough given a certain audience's beliefs about what kind of predictions are possible. If it takes lava lamps to convince that audience, well then ok.
Re: The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
#26With a one-time pad being, as I understand it, the only really good encryption, I am surprised there is not a market for pairs of matched hard drives—the pair having the same "one time pad" stored on them (how you generate those numbers is left as an exercise for the company marketing them). A simple app could be used by parties on both ends of the message—an app that relies on an associated drive to act as the pad.…
Russian one time pads were frequently broken. How? They were inconvenient to distribute, so people reused them.
Symmetric cryptography is safer because one key can easily protect as much data as you need.
Re: The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
#27I suspect the author hasn't heard of physical unclonable functions.
Re: The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
#28They don't actually do anything, but I think it's hard to tell a story where they make things worse, given that Cloudflare is a cryptographically competent org. It's just getting mixed into the already-secure conventional CSPRNG they're using (almost certainly: just the Linux kernel RNG).
> I think it's hard to tell a story where they make things worse [...] mixed into the [...] CSPRNG I think it's easy to tell a story where it's slightly worse. I mean, for any budget of storage bits and CPU cycles, any "inferior" random data necessarily pushes out "better" stuff.
It's all hashed together. The whole LRNG design assumes most of its inputs are structured or poorly randomized.
Re: The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm dead sure they aren't using them for anything. This is SF. If they were really used for anything, a random dude in a black hoodie and white SUV can just smash the glass and take down the internet, and the SF police wouldn't do a thing.
Smashing the glass wouldn't make it less effective. The sensor itself has noise, and the camera output is fed into an HMAC with a key based on the current nanosecond before being combined with a traditional entropy source before it ever went anywhere. Even then, it was only used as a seed for the entropy pool on the actual server.
> and the camera output is fed into
snip snip ?
Re: The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means
#30With a one-time pad being, as I understand it, the only really good encryption, I am surprised there is not a market for pairs of matched hard drives—the pair having the same "one time pad" stored on them (how you generate those numbers is left as an exercise for the company marketing them). A simple app could be used by parties on both ends of the message—an app that relies on an associated drive to act as the pad.…
One-time pad has 2 problems:
(1) The key can only be used once. If you use the same key for multiple different messages it's not secure anymore.
(2) The key has to be the same length as the message.
With those 2 restrictions, OTP is not really that feasible for practical applications.