5 ms·

If i am remembering correctly, there was a company that was using videos of lava lamps for encryption or as passwords or some such. The claim was that it is un

by anu7df 5y ago

If i am remembering correctly, there was a company that was using videos of lava lamps for encryption or as passwords or some such. The claim was that it is un crackable because truly random. I wonder if this can be used to emulate the physical process and break that encryption.

muxamilian 5y ago
Cloudflare does that: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encr... That’s an interesting aspect, which I haven’t thought of. I think real world lava lamps have very chaotic behavior. I think the neural network, however, just learns the most common behaviors of a lava lamp but so far cannot learn every aspect of a lava lamp. Training a bigger neural network could work though…
gus_massa 5y ago
Note that this method generate a video that looks nice and is very similar to a lava lamp, but it's not a 100% pixel perfect simulation of a lava lamp. I'm not sure if you can use an image or short video as a seed, but in case it's possible, the rest of the real video and the rest of the video generated by this will look similar for a short time, but after a while they will be more and more different. It's similar to turning on two lamps of the same factory at the same time. In spite they look similar initially, after a while they will look different. In particular a real lamp will get some vibration the cars in the streets that will affect the content just a little, but after a while the chaotic behavior will make the differences bigger. Also small temperature differences from the sunlight from the window, and other stuff that looks unimportant will cause the real lamp to have a unpredictable behavior after some time.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pavlov 5y ago
I remember hearing this in the late ‘90s, and the company using “camera pointed at lava lamp” as a random number seed was SGI.
thunderbong 5y ago
Past threads - Cloudflare generating Pseudo-random numbers from 100 lava lamps (4 years ago - 4 comments - gizmodo.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320 Lavarand - Hardware random number generator using lava lamps (11 years ago - 0 comments - wikipedia.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320 Relevant website - LavaRnd http://www.lavarnd.org/lavarnd.html http://www.lavarnd.org/lavarnd.html
webmaven 5y ago
> If i am remembering correctly, there was a company that was using videos of lava lamps for encryption or as passwords or some such. The method dates back to SGI's Lavarand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand A related system, LavaRnd uses webcams that have their lenscaps on, so the sensors are only detecting thermal noise: https://www.lavarand.org/ https://www.lavarand.org/ But Cloudflare is the most famous implementor of the technique: https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-production/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-produ... ISTR that US embassies tried using atmospheric noise as a seed for generating one-time pads at some point, but that was deprecated as being too vulnerable to undetectable outside interference. By comparison, the Cloudflare system with the lava lamps in the lobby is tamper-evident. > The claim was that it is un crackable because truly random. I wonder if this can be used to emulate the physical process and break that encryption. No. Chaotic processes are so sensitive to initial conditions and perturbations from the environment that any simulation quickly diverges from the actual process being simulated. Other common macroscale systems that exhibit this property are the three body problem and double pendulums.
btrettel 5y ago
Similating a Lava lamp with ML doesn't affect the security of RNGs in my view. You could do a computer simulation of a Lava lamp with the Navier-Stokes equations for a long time now. Chaos theory would mean that predicting the long-term future of a particular realization would require extremely high precision measurements of the initial conditions and boundary conditions of the lamp, certainly beyond what is feasible and possibly beyond what is possible. ML doesn't change that fact. It is possible, however, to predict statistics but that wouldn't be useful to break encryption.
fennecs 5y ago
A neural network is only producing a probably bad approximation (but maybe visually okay) solution to the Navier stokes equations. The real lava lamp is doing it exactly. Maybe the neural network produces good enough looking pictures and it’s cheap to run instead of solving the PDEs. But don’t think its going to be that accurate.
- amelius 5y ago
  Maybe the neural network can act as a preconditioner for the navier stokes equations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preconditioner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preconditioner
sethammons 5y ago
Huh, i was, literally this morning, staring at a lava lamp and wondering about its potential as a random seed :)
- amelius 5y ago
  Just don't place it near a window ...

by anu7df 5y ago

muxamilian 5y ago

Cloudflare does that: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encr... That’s an interesting aspect, which I haven’t thought of. I think real world lava lamps have very chaotic behavior. I think the neural network, however, just learns the most common behaviors of a lava lamp but so far cannot learn every aspect of a lava lamp. Training a bigger neural network could work though…

gus_massa 5y ago

Note that this method generate a video that looks nice and is very similar to a lava lamp, but it's not a 100% pixel perfect simulation of a lava lamp. I'm not sure if you can use an image or short video as a seed, but in case it's possible, the rest of the real video and the rest of the video generated by this will look similar for a short time, but after a while they will be more and more different. It's similar to turning on two lamps of the same factory at the same time. In spite they look similar initially, after a while they will look different. In particular a real lamp will get some vibration the cars in the streets that will affect the content just a little, but after a while the chaotic behavior will make the differences bigger. Also small temperature differences from the sunlight from the window, and other stuff that looks unimportant will cause the real lamp to have a unpredictable behavior after some time.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pavlov 5y ago

I remember hearing this in the late ‘90s, and the company using “camera pointed at lava lamp” as a random number seed was SGI.

thunderbong 5y ago

Past threads - Cloudflare generating Pseudo-random numbers from 100 lava lamps (4 years ago - 4 comments - gizmodo.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320 Lavarand - Hardware random number generator using lava lamps (11 years ago - 0 comments - wikipedia.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320 Relevant website - LavaRnd http://www.lavarnd.org/lavarnd.html http://www.lavarnd.org/lavarnd.html

webmaven 5y ago

> If i am remembering correctly, there was a company that was using videos of lava lamps for encryption or as passwords or some such. The method dates back to SGI's Lavarand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand A related system, LavaRnd uses webcams that have their lenscaps on, so the sensors are only detecting thermal noise: https://www.lavarand.org/ https://www.lavarand.org/ But Cloudflare is the most famous implementor of the technique: https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-production/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-produ... ISTR that US embassies tried using atmospheric noise as a seed for generating one-time pads at some point, but that was deprecated as being too vulnerable to undetectable outside interference. By comparison, the Cloudflare system with the lava lamps in the lobby is tamper-evident. > The claim was that it is un crackable because truly random. I wonder if this can be used to emulate the physical process and break that encryption. No. Chaotic processes are so sensitive to initial conditions and perturbations from the environment that any simulation quickly diverges from the actual process being simulated. Other common macroscale systems that exhibit this property are the three body problem and double pendulums.

btrettel 5y ago

Similating a Lava lamp with ML doesn't affect the security of RNGs in my view. You could do a computer simulation of a Lava lamp with the Navier-Stokes equations for a long time now. Chaos theory would mean that predicting the long-term future of a particular realization would require extremely high precision measurements of the initial conditions and boundary conditions of the lamp, certainly beyond what is feasible and possibly beyond what is possible. ML doesn't change that fact. It is possible, however, to predict statistics but that wouldn't be useful to break encryption.

fennecs 5y ago

A neural network is only producing a probably bad approximation (but maybe visually okay) solution to the Navier stokes equations. The real lava lamp is doing it exactly. Maybe the neural network produces good enough looking pictures and it’s cheap to run instead of solving the PDEs. But don’t think its going to be that accurate.

amelius 5y ago
Maybe the neural network can act as a preconditioner for the navier stokes equations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preconditioner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preconditioner

sethammons 5y ago

Huh, i was, literally this morning, staring at a lava lamp and wondering about its potential as a random seed :)

amelius 5y ago
Just don't place it near a window ...