Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Any distribution with a sufficient amount of entropy can be turned into "cryptographic-grade" randomness source using randomness extractors [1]. These work independently of any outside factors that might be trying to sneak signal (e.g. periodicity) into the noise -- as long as you can prove there's sufficient entropy to start with, you're good to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_extractor




Low-intensity radiation is random enough, but it's slow: your device is necessarily twiddling thumbs between a detected event and the next, and entropy is mostly proportional to the number of events (for example, almost n bits from what of 2^n identical units is hit by the next particle).


Once you get 16-48ish bytes depending on paranoia you can just rely on crypto




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: