4 ms·
Please don’t use the described approach, which doesn’t un-bias or decorrelate the samples. And where do you get the seed for your PRNG anyway? There are litera
by tatersolid 5y ago
Please don’t use the described approach, which doesn’t un-bias or decorrelate the samples. And where do you get the seed for your PRNG anyway?
There are literally thousands of academic papers written on the topic of un-biasing and “extracting entropy” from noise sources. Most are overly complex; if you want a practical but secure approach see Yarrow, Fortuna, or the Linux kernel entropy pool.
- sterlind 5y agoThe seed from the PRNG would come from e.g. a few thousand samples of the radioactive decay. Isn't radioactive decay true random because it's a quantum effect? How could you have biased/correlated Geiger blips?
- tatersolid 5y agoLet’s assume you’re getting absolute time stamps or arrival intervals from your Geiger counter. How do you convert those into a uniformly random PRNG seed? They will all be biased to a small range depending on your radiation source and measurement apparatus. Secondly, non-cryptographic PRNGs leak their state from their outputs. This is a solved problem. Many academic and engineering hours have been put into real solutions. Dear reader, please use a recognized secure scheme instead of the amateur ad-hoc approach recommended up-thread. It has no theoretic or engineering basis. Don’t roll your own crypto.