Exploiting Network Captures For Truer Randomness 189
First time accepted submitter ronaldm writes "As a composer who uses computers for anything and everything from engraving to live performance projects, it's periodically of some concern that computers do exactly what they're supposed to do — what they're told. Introducing imperfections into music to make it sound more 'natural' is nothing new: yet it still troubles me that picking up random data from /dev/random to do this is well, cheating. It's not random. It bugs me. So, short of bringing in and using an atomic source, here's a way to embrace natural randomness — and bring your packet captures to life!"
/dev/random (Score:3, Informative)
This seems like a fairly lame variant of the environmental entropy gathering which *is* what /dev/random does...
not nearly as "random" as /dev/random (Score:5, Informative)
/dev/random on most OS'ed these days uses an entropy pool generated from a bunch of different sources - timing of keystrokes, mouse movements, disk seeking - and yes, network information. Then it uses cryptographic hashes on those.
Your implementation basically uses one of those entropy sources, and then doesn't even hash it...
Re:If I would (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, many people would sell you the answer. And they don't have nobel-prices[sic].
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator [wikipedia.org] for an overview of the devices you're looking for.
Re:Confusion... (Score:3, Informative)
First and foremost, Slashdot (as you know) unfortunately chooses the URL for your particular story. "Truer[sic] Randomness" is not in fact what I'm going out to somehow magically solve (with my absolute non-background in cryptography etc.). As to why they chose to enter the title of the story as such - I don't know. A bit of sensationalism, perhaps? In any case, I'd originally titled this "Musical Network Captures" - no more, no less!
Why not use
Finally, I'm a bit overwhelmed by the whole Slashdot thing. As it's all worked out, it seems that on my first 'go' at adding something that I thought a couple of people would be interested in, it's seemed to hit the front page - and so at least, next time, I'll know to not be so trigger-happy when I'm 'submitting' something to here! Apologies for all of you who seem to have fallen out with one another and spent half your time bickering over nothing.
--R