Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 12 submissions in the queue.

Submission Preview

Link to Story

Big Bang left us with a perfect random number generator

Accepted submission by AnonTechie at 2015-11-12 09:34:09
Security

Want a FIPS 140-2 RNG [wikipedia.org] ? 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 [arxiv.org], 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/ [theregister.co.uk]


Original Submission