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Cloudflare launches League of Entropy: distributed random number generator
- PhantomGremlin 7y agoI love the general idea, but I'm not really impressed by some of the implementations. E.g. one of them uses /dev/urandom, another uses ChaCha20. So, e.g., how did the ChaCha20 generator get seeded? If you know the initial seed, don't you know the output for all time? There's a guy on the net who has been generating hardware random numbers for perhaps 23 years, using radioactive decay. All things equal, I'd trust that method over ChaCha20. https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/ And when I saw EPFL (i.e. people from Switzerland) I immediately thought of ID Quantique. They are a Swiss company that sell an RNG that attempts to exploit quantum effects. They send individual photons at a semi-transparent mirror and detect whether those photons are transmitted or reflected. If the hardware is implemented correctly, that seems pretty darn random. https://www.idquantique.com/random-number-generation/products/quantis-random-number-generator/ https://www.idquantique.com/random-number-generation/product... But the League of Entropy guys from Switzerland chose /dev/urandom instead of quantum mechanics. Exactly whose /dev/urandom output? Is is a desktop computer sitting on some guy's desk? The Cloudflare article linked to EPFL, not to the specific project. It's like saying "we get our random bits from MIT". Huh? MIT is a big school. Exactly where at MIT?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]