Re:A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
by jstanley on Monday January 01, 2018 @06:10AM
(#16045655)
If the information encoded in the lava lamps is not important for the entropy, why do they even need to be there?
If it just needs to be some image, and it doesn't actually matter if others know what it can see, why not just point the camera at a normal lamp, or an empty room, or the sky?
Re:A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
by crazyhatfish on Monday January 01, 2018 @07:16AM
(#16045782)
It is, the author is just saying that even without it they still have enough entropy in the system to be secure enough.
Any old image doesn't have pretty strong random number generators in it.
They (CF) discuss this on their deep dive:
>>>The flow of the “lava” in a lava lamp is very unpredictable,6 and so the entropy in those lamps is incredibly high. Even if we conservatively assume that the camera has a resolution of 100x100 pixels (of course it’s actually much higher) and that an attacker can guess the value of any pixel of that image to within one bit of precision (e.g., they know that a particular pixel has a red value of either 123 or 124, but they aren’t sure which it is), then the total amount of entropy produced by the image is 100x100x3 = 30,000 bits (the x3 is because each pixel comprises three values - a red, a green, and a blue channel). This is orders of magnitude more entropy than we need. [1]
1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty...