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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 13 2015, @09:55PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday November 13 2015, @09:55PM (#262850)

    I guess that these folks are "no real mathematicians" then:

    The Mersenne Twister is the default PRNG for the following software systems: R,[3] Python,[4][5] Ruby,[6] PHP,[7] CMU Common Lisp,[8] Embeddable Common Lisp,[9] Steel Bank Common Lisp,[10] Free Pascal,[11] GLib,[12] SageMath,[13] Maple,[14] MATLAB,[15] GAUSS,[16] IDL,[17] Julia,[18] Scilab,[19] Stata,[20] GNU Octave,[21] the GNU Scientific Library,[22] the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library,[23] and Microsoft Visual C++.[24] It is also available in standard C++ (since C++11)[25][26] and Apache.[27] Add-on implementations are provided in many program libraries, including the Boost C++ Libraries[28] and the NAG Numerical Library.[29]

    The Mersenne Twister is one of two PRNGs in SPSS: the other generator is kept only for compatibility with older programs, and the Mersenne Twister is stated to be "more reliable".[30] The Mersenne Twister is similarly one of the PRNGs in SAS: the other generators are older and deprecated.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday November 15 2015, @03:54PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Sunday November 15 2015, @03:54PM (#263670) Homepage
    Who says they were impressed by it? They simply used it. I'm not impressed by my toilet, but I still use it. And many of them use it because it's already in a bigger library that they've chosen to use, and therefore they've not actually chosen it themselves anyway, they'll just use whatever it defaults too. And most of them adopted it after it had the elastoplasts attached.

    Fortunately, real mathematicians, and other people who care, will know how to get good random numbers out of MT. GLib certainly *didn't* last time I looked. (The random "pipes" in GIMP were showing clearly distinguishable from random behaviour, which was pissing me off as it was fucking up the images I was doodling, so I delved into the source to see why.)
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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 15 2015, @06:12PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday November 15 2015, @06:12PM (#263704)

      What could they do to get MT wrong? Initialize it with zeroes? I mean, that's just a basic screwup by the implementer.

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      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday November 15 2015, @06:42PM

        by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Sunday November 15 2015, @06:42PM (#263715) Homepage
        Yeah, it was inappropriately seeded and conditioned. Newb error, but there are way too many newbs who just see "long period, will never repeat", and just start drooling rather than thinking.
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