Re:NeuG USB True Random Number Generator
by kozak on Friday January 05, 2018 @01:17PM
(#16080397)
Shoot some photographs (or video frames), make sure there are no duplicates, take hash functions of them, delete the images - and voila, you have the finest true random bits of data.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
It's not that simple.
Some years ago I used an analog TV card tuned to an empty channel that was giving seemingly white noise and captured frames to generate entropy. I only used the least significant bit of each RGB value of each pixel.
When I supplied the bits to the diehard testsuite, it complained about a number of patterns and failing tests.
The hash function will of course save you, but it's hard to tell the amount of real randomness that's coming from the sensor.
update: Oh, I may have misunderstood. If the whole images changes in random ways and is secret, then of course this is fine.
That's exactly what CloudFlare does with their lava lamps. https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty...