Trool
Good Karma
Joined: 12 Sep 2003
Posts: 1486
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 Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 9:12 am Post subject: Random Number Generator |
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I was listening to Security Now and they were talking about random number generators. As it turns out SGI has a way of generating random numbers for their security encryption through the use of lava lamps. I found a little blurb on this:
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,69677,00.html
| Quote: | Perhaps the oddest source for random numbers is lava lamps - yes, lava lamps, those lit-from-below, tapered glass bulbs with colored blobs of moving liquid that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Their use for random numbers was devised by researchers Robert G. Mende Jr., Landon Curt Noll and Sanjeev Sisodiya at Silicon Graphics Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., and was dubbed "lavarand." Noll and his colleagues decided that the unpredictably rising and falling blobs in a lava lamp would make a convenient source of randomness. Their process for generating random numbers is as follows:
A digital camera periodically photographs a set of six lava lamps, adding its own electronic noise to the data. The 921,600 bytes of the original image are compressed and scrambled into a 140-byte packet, which then serves as the seed value for a software-based pseudorandom number generator. "While any good chaotic source could be used, we favor lava lamps, in part because they are cool," the researchers say. |
Also the company that maintains this now is:
http://www.lavarnd.org/
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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, isn't 'Eureka!' but rather 'hmm....that's funny.'
--Isaac Asimov |
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