Exploiting Network Captures For Truer Randomness

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Dahamma]

/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

[JabberWokky]

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...

[ronaldm]

I'm going to reply to just the one poster, as explaining this to each /.'r would take rather a long time! :)

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 /dev/random? It's not random per se which is required - it's a pseudo-random source which can still be directly influenced by those in the immediate environment. For installation purposes, for example, it's a quick (unorthodox, convoluted, fucked-up, whatever-you-wanna-call it) way of generating an input that can be used to further modulate other inputs/sounds. For this, a stream of random numbers alone is not good enough. There's a million and one ways this could have been done - it just so happens that this is how I decided I'd go about doing it.

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