[11693] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Fwd: Physics News Update 605 - liquid crystal random number
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bram Cohen)
Thu Sep 19 13:13:43 2002
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 10:10:08 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bram Cohen <bram@gawth.com>
To: Charles McElwain <mcelwain@theworld.com>
Cc: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
In-Reply-To: <p04320409b9af7b1156cf@[208.192.102.6]>
Charles McElwain wrote:
> >James Gleeson, a physicist at Kent State
> >University (330-672-9592, gleeson@physics.kent.edu) has come up with a
> >cheap, fast solution. He shoots laser light into a sample of liquid
> >crystals. But because the sample is subject to a turbulent flow, causing
> >haphazard fluctuations in the orientation of the liquid crystals, the
> >digitized transmitted light coming from the sample represents a stream of
> >random numbers.
There's no way a laser's going to be cheaper than a Johnson noise
generator.
Really, the random number generation has been solved - use a Johnson noise
generator for the random bits, and (not withstanding /dev/random's
suboptimal behavior) put them through a cryptographic device which will
spew out indefinite amounts of random numbers once it's gotten
sufficiently seeded.
-Bram Cohen
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
-- John Maynard Keynes
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