Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Lava Lamps, Chaos, and Encryption

Now Noll is working with Cooper on an improved RNG called LavaRnd (which debuted in May at www.lavarnd.org). The new process replaces the lava lamps with a more Zen-like source of entropy: a webcam with its lens cap on. The chaotic thermal "noise" emitted by the webcam is digitized and put through a hash algorithm that churns the number set, stripping unwanted sections of predictability. The result is a cryptographically strong sequence of numbers, ready for use in the real world. And because the new service is open source, patent-free, and license-free, anyone will be able to cheaply build and operate a LavaRnd server and receive the precious commodity free of charge - a random act of kindness.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/random.html
Posted by at
Labels: ,

Popular Posts

  • Japanese Dragon Mythology Lives On
    The concept of dragons was probably brought to Japan around 2,000 years ago, along with the technology for paddy agriculture. Their images h...
  • Contact Addresses Regarding FTAA
    ...These measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of individu...
  • Optical Cryptography
    His system, he said, starts with a laser that sends part of its beam into photo detectors which produce electrical signal that feed back to ...
  • Your new IT budget: $10
    Someone that gets it. Service-oriented software, when done correctly in a platform-agnostic way can be flexible, cheap, and can motivate m...
  • More Terror Attacks to Come
    ...why was this given the file name of skyfall?... Certain information, while not specific as to target, gives the government reason to beli...
  • Putting In A Wireless Network
    When it comes to buying equipment, think g, not b. New 802.11g hardware is nearly five times faster than 802.11b gear, and it will interoper...
  • The Epic Of Gilgamesh
    This edition provides a prose rendering of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the cycle of poems preserved on clay tablets surviving from ancient Mesopo...
  • Good Article On Bandwith vs Latency
    From the bygone debates over DDR vs. RDRAM to the current controversy over Apples DDR implementations, one issue is commonly misunderstood i...
  • NASA Plans Permanant Moon Base
    In my mind, this is a huge waste of effort. Put a base on Mars instead of the Moon -- there's huge science finds waiting there to be dis...
  • Why Great Minds Can't Grasp Consciousness
    Personally, I believe that consciousness is an emergent property of complex, ordered (yet chaotic) systems which are not necessarily biologi...

Like us on Facebook