[Cryptography] ideas for (long) Nothing up my sleeve numbers

Arnold Reinhold agr at me.com
Wed Apr 2 13:39:23 EDT 2014


> 2. is harder; lets get to coding theory -- so-called "random codes" (which
> we are producing by this) actually have extremely high chance of having the
> qualities one needs for SYND (e.g. good minimum distance and so). This
> chance is usually measured from a random sample of all codes over F_2^n for
> some reasonable n, from that they are called "random" and probably from
> that I made the mess with using "random" word more than I should. :D
> 
> Therefore, for this purpose, it is sufficient that "there's no
> (polynomially) recognizable underlying structure that could be used for
> decoding" in the matrices; which has been shown to easily reduce to the
> fact that the codes look "uniformly random" (words from the paper).

Sounds like what you want is not a classic "nothing up my sleeves" number, which may indeed have polynomially recognizable underlying structure, but something truly random. Doing a "Hail Mary pass" of combining everything under the sun leaves open the possibility of selecting a set of choices with some hidden property.  

I would suggest digesting random bits from one of the many large, publicly available astronomical data sets. The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) images of the Sun seem like a good candidate, particularly the AIA 304 images which show a rotating boiling mass. Maybe select one image per day http://sdowww.lmsal.com/suntoday/ going back in time from April 1, 2014 and feed them into Keccak/SHA3-512. Then take the output after each image as your final bits until you have enough.

Arnold Reinhold


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