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posted by martyb on Friday November 13 2015, @01:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the entropy-FTW dept.

Want a FIPS 140-2 RNG? Look at the universe. The cosmic background radiation bathes Earth in enough random numbers to encrypt everything forever. Using the cosmic background radiation – the "echo of the Big Bang" – as a random number generation isn't a new idea, but a couple of scientists have run the slide-rule over measurements of the CMB power spectrum and reckon it offers a random number space big enough to beat any current computer.

Not in terms of protecting messages against any current decryption possibility: the CMB's power spectrum offers a key space "too large for the encryption/decryption capacities of present computer systems". A straightforward terrestrial radio telescope, this Arxiv paper states, should be good enough to make "astrophysical entropy sources accessible on comparatively modest budgets".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/big_bang_left_us_with_a_perfect_random_number_generator/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @05:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @05:18PM (#262751)

    Well, first off they're not trying to "sell" anything. Their paper is about how random the CMB is.

    Secondly, what do you mean you run your frames through a hash matrix? Are you taking a single frame and hashing that, or are you doing some sort of time-series analysis of individual pixels? In either case, I don't think it is as random as you think it is. I don't doubt that it is good enough for what you want, but I think you're misleading yourself on how truly random it is. You can only exploit the entropy that you're passing to the hash, otherwise you won't need to pass the hash anything, and the point of their paper is that the CMB is sufficiently random for any current use case.