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Big Bang Left Us with a Perfect Random Number Generator

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

AnonTechie writes:

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, @07:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @07:21PM (#262796)

    ... since on one hand we are trying to create something cryptographically secure

    Not always, many applications of RNGs are not security related -- this is true for all applications of MT19937 because this is not a crypographically secure RNG (it is possible to determine the entire state of the generator by observing a handful of outputs).

    I've been dabbling in PRNG research myself, and lately I am pretty unimpressed with all periodic PRNGs. Why settle for a period when we have a huge class of real numbers with essentially perfect properties: the normal numbers.

    All deterministic generators with bounded internal state will be periodic, because there are only finitely many possible states. If you generate enough outputs (more than the number of states), the generator must have repeated a state (by pigeon hole principle).

  • (Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday November 13 2015, @08:01PM

    by melikamp (1886) on Friday November 13 2015, @08:01PM (#262807) Journal

    All deterministic generators with bounded internal state will be periodic,

    True, but of course there are very simple (non-halting) PRNGs with unbounded state. While technically bounded by the amount of available memory, they would not be bounded for any practical purpose. Like this one, for example, will print the most famous normal number, and won't run out of memory during our lifetimes:

    ; Using Common LISP for brevity, since having the long arithmetic really helps
    (loop for x from 0 do (write x))