[Cryptography] Photon beam splitters for "true" random number generation ?

[Tom Mitchell]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 4:45 PM, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:

>
> On Dec 22, 2015, at 1:45 PM, Bill Frantz <frantz at pwpconsult.com> wrote:
>
> > On 12/21/15 at 7:26 PM, mitch at niftyegg.com (Tom Mitchell) wrote:
> >
> >> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 6:51 AM, Patrick Chkoreff <
> patrick at rayservers.net>
> >> wrote:
> >> ...
> >>> Right, or use a set of 16-sided dice.  I bought some a few years ago.
> >>>
> >>
> >> Why 16-side?
> >> N-sides allows base N and conversion to any other interesting base
> would be
> >> easy

....

> >
> > I wanted to use random chance in a knitting pattern I was building, so I
> tossed a coin. I quickly gave up on the coin when I discovered that my
> tosses were quite biased. I moved to using /dev/random.
> >
> > Even with a reasonably unbiased item like a coin, getting random tosses
> can be hard.
>
> I’m honestly not sure if this discussion is serious or not because rolling
> dice is so obviously silly
>

Rolling dice is not silly as long as you are rolling quality dice.
If common casino dice had a bias the cases of even odds in the fast game of
craps
would be an opportunity to make money.   For an individual with
less than quality dice the nature of the flaw is difficult for an
attacker to discover if the traffic is low.

Converting from six sided result to a hex is a simple number
base conversion that can be verified with pencil and paper
while the more complex sha256 computation is harder to verify.

As for "A truly random number" that topic needs to be qualified to
something like "sufficiently random to purpose" or "sufficiently
difficult to game".

There are reasons that lottery results are generated with
a physical device.  Theater, visible, sufficiently random,
a priori unpredictable.   This contrasts with the "quick" pick
where the generated values have to equitably cover
the possible result space.

Crypto systems today do need endure attacks at many levels
and numerical systems must operate at both ends in a reliable
difficult to attack way in contrast to one time pads or very methods
used for low volume low bandwidth systems.

Merry christmas to all and may all our crypto be used to protect
world wide peace and joy.



-- 
  T o m    M i t c h e l l
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