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Encryption Security Science

Quantum Random Numbers For Download 132

Posted by timothy from the 404*pi-404^e-404mod401 dept.
PSUdaemon writes "The University of Geneva has produced a website that allows you to download truly random numbers generated from an Optical quantum random number generator. They will also be releasing a client API that you can use directly in your codes to download random numbers."
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Quantum Random Numbers For Download More

Quantum Random Numbers For Download

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  • Uh-oh (Score:5, Funny)

    by bobthemonkey13 ( 215219 ) <keegan@nOSpaM.xor67.org> on Monday March 22, 2004 @06:41PM (#8639935) Homepage Journal
    In other news, the Slashdot effect causes a 500-lightyear radius of spacetime to disappear into an Infinite Improbability Field.

  • w00t! (Score:1, Funny)

    by pradeepe ( 608025 )
    now i can finally get decent approximations for my future physics grades!
  • Hmmz... would it be something like taking a full sack of numbered blocks and picking them ?

    Anyway, there cannot be a TRULY random number. There is nothing random. For everything there is an equation.
    _____________
    http://www.rate.ee/useri nfo.php?id=44769
    Just for testing...

    • Re:Truly Random Number ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22, 2004 @06:48PM (#8640007)
      Anyway, there cannot be a TRULY random number. There is nothing random. For everything there is an equation.

      Read Here [randomnumbers.info]

      It's only one click away from the first page.

      According to Nicolas Gisin, professor at the Group of Applied Physics, .Quantum physics is the only physical theory predicting that the outcome of certain phenomena is random. It is thus a natural choice to use it to generate true random numbers..

      Next you'll be telling us you know more that he does.

      • There is however no way for us to know whether quantum randomness is true randomness or just apparent randomness, as if coming out of a pseudorandom number generator. And only one case can be proven (hypothetically, that is) - the lack of randomness - by finding a formula whose output is identical to that of the observed apparent randomness.

        • Re:Truly Random Number ? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Too Much Noise ( 755847 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @07:27PM (#8640350) Journal
          There is. Google for Bell's inequality or the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paradoxfor a starting point. It does involve some more than skin-deep knowledge of quantum mechanics though.

          The bottom line is there's no theory of 'local hidden variables' that would make quantum mechanics a deterministic theory in the 'classical' sense.
          • But the point is, we don't know that quantum mechanics is correct.

            • Re:Truly Random Number ? (Score:4, Informative)

              by Too Much Noise ( 755847 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @08:17PM (#8640673) Journal
              The EPR paradox, as modified by Bell, is actually a test of Quantum Mechanics - on the level of some basic assumptions, including the lack of classical determinism. It was tested (mostly in the '60-'70) and found to hold w.r.t. this issue (see Phys Rev Lett 49, 91) - were Bell's inequality to be found true, it would have meant the QM assumptions were wrong, making all QM wrong. Guess what, it didn't hold true ...

              So, at least the general principles of QM are correct. What this means is that there are non-local effects embedded in the theory, which make a deterministic (and thus predictable, i.e. non-random) description impossible.
              • Guess what, it didn't hold true ... So, at least the general principles of QM are correct.

                Well, that's a leap there. In the propositional calculus, a implies b and not a does not imply not b. The law of gravity would be proven incorrect if someone is going to be levitating above their desk at 10:00 am tomorrow. If that DOESN'T happen, the law of gravity may still be incorrect, but it doesn't prove it.

                Another point I'd like to make is that quantum mechanics is merely a theory, as in a way of understa

                • oh well, there were unstated elements ^_^

                  to make it formally correct: Bell's Inequality would have shown that QM is incomplete (and actually wrong) in the non-local assumptions. It being false, the non-local assumptions (with which it is formally incompatible) hold. That dows not prove QM. But the point was not to show QM is wrong (that would have been a bonus). What it says now is QM can be an incomplete theory - and it actually is. Notice that, this way, it's still correct at some level, while incomplete

              • So, at least the general principles of QM are correct. What this means is that there are non-local effects embedded in the theory, which make a deterministic (and thus predictable, i.e. non-random) description impossible.

                No, not quite. It makes a local, deterministic description impossible. It does not make it impossible that the outcome of each measurement event was determined by the quantum wavefunction of the universe as a whole, only that it can't be predicted by a quantum wavefunction involving o

                • It makes a local, deterministic description impossible.

                  I was only trying not to repeat 'local' too many times. (that being the initial problem, the non-locality of QM). Yes, Bell's inequality only contradicts QM on a local level.

                  But once you have to take 'the Universe as a whole' into account you're done. There's no possible description anymore, since you do not have access to all the controlling parameters. All you can do is approximate and thus make a global theory a moot point, since it's pretty much

                  • Agreed.

                    The distinction is between random meaning not deterministic and random meaning not predictable.

                    The second is about the availability of information and the ability to process it. It is certainly true that quantum fluctuations provide a source of numbers which is not predictable in practice, and it can probably be proved that it can't be predicted, given reasonable assumptions about the availability of information about the quantum state of the generator.

                    For the first, I'm not sure any experimen

              • Which IMHO also makes the World in the Film 'Matrix' impossible.
            • But the point is, we don't know that quantum mechanics is correct.

              In the sense that we know anything in science, we know that quantum mechanics is correct. If you want to go down the path of "all science is just the current best guess", that's true, and we'll all end up talking about whether we're just brains in a lab somewhere being fed artificial stimulation to simulate reality.

              The nature of the true randomness of quantum phenomena is about as well known and verified as anything in science.

      • Always remember the Wisdom of Von Neumann :
        "Anyone who uses determininstic methods to generate random numbers is living in a state of sin."

        But if the equation is longer(in bits) than the random number, it is random in a very nice way.

        For equation, read "Turing Machine" to be a bit more careful. To be even more careful, read the papers on the process. Google for Chaitin and "Kolmogorov complexity".

        Note that I'm carefully not saying to use such things in cryptography.

      • Next you'll be telling us you know more that he does.

        No, I'm not. I surely do not know more than almost any of Physics professor you can name here.

        I just believe that for everything there is a formula and that there's a kinda metaformula, which describes EVERYTHING in this world.
        Everything else is simplification.

        Maybe my theory is wrong. But then again - nothing is wrong unless proved so.

        (pardon my English, it's almost 3am here, I'm having a bad flu and it's not my first language.)
        • I just believe that for everything there is a formula and that there's a kinda metaformula, which describes EVERYTHING in this world.

          Sounds fair alright. But tell me, how could such "metaformula" be else than from some metametaformula ? Etc. etc. etc.

          These Sisyphean endeavours are much fun, but peeps have to learn when to stop when determinism's the issue :)
        • I just believe that for everything there is a formula and that there's a kinda metaformula, which describes EVERYTHING in this world.... Maybe my theory is wrong.

          It is wrong. Godel said so. The problem is that your metaformula describes all truths, but there are more truths than there are possible descriptions.

      • But how can you create a program to generate truly random numbers if in the code you have to make starting and ending point?

    • Re:Truly Random Number ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Experiment 626 ( 698257 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @07:02PM (#8640114)

      At the macroscopic level, that's true, but at the quantum level the type of determinism you describe ("For everything there is an equation") breaks down. Consider Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the more precisely the position is known, the less precisely the momentum can be known. Even with instruments advanced enough to measure one of these values with infinite precision, the other would be unknown, and no equation could be created to describe the particle's state. It could be anything, and there is no way to predict what its exact value will be.

      This is very useful for true randomness, unlike the sack of blocks. If you measured the state of the blocks, you would find that they obey Newtonian mechanics, and you could predict which block was on top, given enough information about their state at some point and the forces acting upon them. With quantum particles, gathering that much information about the state is precluded by the laws of quantum physics, so the answer is effectively random.

      • Re:Truly Random Number ? (Score:4, Informative)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @07:09PM (#8640169)
        IT doesn't even hold up in macro worlds. Take a simple 2 body gravitational problem. Solvable since Newton's day. Add in a third body. Unsolvable. The fact that there are unsolvable macro occurences is the basis of chaos theory.
        • That's not quite the same sort of "there is no equation". There are equations that describe perfectly the time evolution of the 3-body problem. There is just (in general) no closed-form solution for the state of the system.

          That said, even assuming a perfect integrator there's no way to measure the initial state precisely, so there are limits to how far you can evolve it computationally. However, similar arguments hold for the 2-body problem; so you'll have to find a more clever way of "macro-fying" quan
        • that's a different kettle of fish. N-body problems are not analytically solvable. That does not make them 'random'. More to the point, you have a case in which accumulated imprecisions will lead (eventually) to a complete prediction failure. However, the equations of the theory are still deterministic - given the initial conditions with enough accuracy, you can predict (with some required accuracy) the final ones, at least for a given time interval. It's just that the more precision and longer time you want
      • If you take a look at this page it explains how it works.

        How they do it [randomnumbers.info]

        At the bottom it explains about the semi transparent mirror system for generating the numbers. The article suggests that the mirror is 50% transparent/50% not transparent. This seems to me to be the point where a bias may be introduced. Surely its physically impossible to manufacture such a mirror to guarantee it is exactly 50/50 either way. It might be a very small bias, but ill bet there is one there. You'd just need a lot of num
      • Just because it's unpredictable doesn't make it random. Quantum physics follows equations and patterns as with everything else in the universe.

        The randomness is only true to the observer.
        --
      • If you measured the state of the blocks, you would find that they obey Newtonian mechanics, and you could predict which block was on top, given enough information about their state at some point and the forces acting upon them.

        So ? OK, now we know which block was on top. Now, how to we know WHICH BLOCK IS TAKEN ? Becomes more random, eh ? Now presume that the person who takes blocks out of the sack is clinically unpredictable. Now, is this TRULY random ?

        Heisenberg's uncertainity principle is as much simp
      • "Consider Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the more precisely the position is known, the less precisely the momentum can be known"

        this only exists because we have limited ability of measuring.,
        any measurement on that level will influence the thing you are measuring.,
        so we invented the theory of quantum mechanics to describe this phenomenon.,
        but in fact we don't know for sure what's beyond this because we have no instruments to measure it.,
        it's our own inability to not interact with a sample that shapes

  • Pffft (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    C:\>echo %random%

  • Not bad, not bad... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vaevictis666 ( 680137 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @06:44PM (#8639971)
    Just ran it through two tests of 1000 numbers with the following result counts:

    Array
    (
    [0] => 505
    [1] => 495
    )

    Array
    (
    [0] => 108
    [1] => 95
    [2] => 99
    [3] => 92
    [4] => 119
    [5] => 87
    [6] => 105
    [7] => 101
    [8] => 80
    [9] => 114
    }

    Not too terribly bad of a distribution to my eye.
    • I thought that if they were truly random, you could get all 505s... it would just be a huge coincidence, right?

      If their random number generator precludes repetition, it's progressively less random, right? Because the randomness becomes infinity (or highest number) - n, n being the number of answers it's taking out of circulation.

      Or am I just on crack?
      • You could, but its highly unlikely, to the point where you could run the program every second for the rest of your life and you'll be unlikely to come close.

        A good way of figuring out if a pattern is likely to be random or not is to run a chi squared approximation, which will show how far off the spread is from expected values.
    • of course I just asked for 1000 random numbers between 1-100. I got 1000 50's, I wonder how many bits/sec they can generate - and what happens if they have to "reuse" a little bit of that quantum state ???

      Inquiring minds want to know

    • Re:Not bad, not bad... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by image ( 13487 )
      > Not too terribly bad of a distribution to my eye.

      It's hard to tell.

      Here's a simple perl script to demonstrate:

      #!/usr/bin/perl -w

      my ( $count, $low, $high ) = @ARGV;

      defined $count and defined $low and defined $high or
      die( "USAGE: rand.pl count low (inclusive) high (exclusive)\n" );

      my $x = 0.5;
      my $r = 3.6;

      for ( $i = 0; $i < 256; $i++ )
      {
      $x = $r * $x * ( 1 - $x );
      }

      for ( $i = 0; $i < $count; $i++ )
      {
      $x = $r * $x * ( 1 - $x );
      my $bits = ( $x * 1000 ) - ( int ( $x * 1000 ) );
      print

    • Yeah! this works great!

      Array
      (
      [0] => 134
      )

      Looks pretty random to my eye.

  • Use VIA cpus for good random numbers instead (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nehemiah and higher VIA cpus have a really good hardware entropy source, and it's supported in all recent linux kernels.

  • is this really random? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by glen604 ( 750214 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @06:46PM (#8639990)
    Are they actually running the "Optical quantum random number generator" every time you click submit, or are they just pulling the numbers pre-generated from a database?
  • How do they really really know for certain, that these numbers are truly random?

    And what kinds of applications might they be used for?

    Why does it need to be a quantum random number generator? How come you cant use an aerial and pick up white noise?

    nick ...
    • How do they really really know for certain, that these numbers are truly random?

      There are statistical tests (see Knuth), like spectral flatness and incompressibility, but complete "certainty" has to rest on the theoretical underpinnings of QM, with testing by Bell's inequality (discussed elsewhere on this page).

      And what kinds of applications might they be used for?

      Secure communications, ignoring for now the problem of distributing the random bits.

      Why does it need to be a quantum random number gener

  • Single point of failure (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kapella ( 3578 )
    As anything other than an academic exercise, this is silly if not outright dangerous.

    Want to compromise any cryptographic system that uses this "pure" RNG? Man-in-the-middle the data connection, or just spoof DNS/IP addresses. Suddenly, you're in control of session key generation...
    • They will also be releasing a client API that you can use directly in your codes to download random numbers.

      I suspect that will be encrypted and involve public key swapping to avoid man in the middle.
    • Want to compromise any cryptographic system that uses this "pure" RNG? Man-in-the-middle the data connection, or just spoof DNS/IP addresses. Suddenly, you're in control of session key generation...

      Using this as the sole random source is criminally negligent, but I see know reason at all why you couldn't use it an yet another input source for a local PRNG. Even if this source were completely 0wn3d, it wouldn't decrease that amount of entropy in the user's pool - it just wouldn't add to it.

      In much the s

  • So how many slashdotters will it take to submit a request for 1000 numbers between 0 and 1 before it generates the binary code for Windows? What about the source code?

    • So how many slashdotters will it take to submit a request for 1000 numbers between 0 and 1 before it generates the binary code for Windows? What about the source code?

      Much longer than it would take for a request for 1000 numbers between 0 and 8191 (2^13), but I digres into a useless rant. The executables generated from the RNG would work better than Windows, maybe.

      Even better, use the RNG to create random code, then use it in conjunction with genetic algorithims (RNG for determining mutation) to crea

      • You know that people have used genetic algorithms to improve some kinds of program? Probably nothing very complicated because the fitness tests would take far too long to run (perhaps the Timex 1000's operating system would be possible!). There was an article in Byte or Dr Dobbs about 10 years ago.

  • This is SOOOOOO Bad (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MerlynEmrys67 ( 583469 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @06:54PM (#8640049)
    Ok, let me get this right - you are expected to "trust" a source of randomness to be purely random, and to correctly destroy all of the information between here and there.

    Plus I just asked for 1000 (the most allowed) numbers between 1 - 100. I was scared by what I got back.

    50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 (repeated quite a bit - cut to pass the poster comment compression filter)

    I was amazed. Any sane person will NOT outsource the generation of their source of randomness - it is WAY to critical.

    • Re:This is SOOOOOO Bad (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Monday March 22, 2004 @07:06PM (#8640143) Homepage Journal
      I would imagine that it's suffering from overuse right now. Top story on Slashdot and all.

      However, yes... you can trust this to be random, and no, you can't trust it to "correctly destroy all of the information between here and there".

      I don't believe that the intent of this is to do realworld crypto nor games (which is what other people are claiming the other "major" use of random numbers are). A set of purely random numbers is really only useful to people testing mathematic theories or other high math science work. For crypto, decent pseudo-random sequences (or the old "pull from an analog source" trick) is perfectly fine. This is overkill for realworld crypto (not to mention broadcast via the internet), which means that this is primarily useful - to math scientists.

      --
      Evan

      • For crypto, decent pseudo-random sequences (or the old "pull from an analog source" trick) is perfectly fine. This is overkill for realworld crypto (not to mention broadcast via the internet), which means that this is primarily useful - to math scientists.

        Say _WHAT_? I sure as hell hope not. I'd rather not have some half-assed pseudo-random sequence for a OTP used on extremely sensitive corporate documents. If you're a huge company (say, IBM), and you have documents that could be feasibly worth one billi
        • If you're a huge company (say, IBM), and you have documents that could be feasibly worth one billion dollars, are you going to entrust them to a pseudo-random generator?

          Yes, and I have (as in, I have been the admin for finance companies dealing with information worth more than a billion dollars). In fact, pretty much all crypto out there uses less than truly random sequences.

          Truly random numbers are exceedingly difficult to get. I'm talking mathematically pure random numbers that math geeks go gaga o

    • Plus I just asked for 1000 (the most allowed) numbers between 1 - 100. I was scared by what I got back.

      50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 (repeated quite a bit - cut to pass the poster comment compression filter)

      Wow, I'd be scared to, I mean.. what are the chances?!?

  • Interesting, but not that useful (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chris_Jefferson ( 581445 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @06:54PM (#8640055) Homepage
    WHile this is cool, on the other hand we mainly need random numbers for two things. The first is to make algorithms which require random numbers to run correctly work and to make games interesting to play. For that kind of purpose this is overkill :)

    The other reason we need them is for secure encryption purposes. If you felt paranoid enough to need quantumly generated random numbers, would you really get the numbers over the internet from an untrusted source?

    What would be much more interesting would be if intel/AMD started including a random number generator directly on processors which allowed you to get some random numbers via some random process on chip.

    • Re:Interesting, but not that useful (Score:5, Informative)

      by MerlynEmrys67 ( 583469 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @07:02PM (#8640118)
      What would be much more interesting would be if intel/AMD started including a random number generator directly on processors which allowed you to get some random numbers via some random process on chip.

      Don't know about AMD, but this has been in Intel's chipsets since at least the 815 (I am pretty sure it was in the 810 chipset). They use a noisy diode and read the the value across it. I know it is certified, but I have never seen the operating range of the certification (I assume it is between x & y degrees Celcius - and at some point the diode starts to read more 0's than 1's or the other way around)

      Many 3rd party crypto companies have other RNGs built into their hardware - it is rather important for various security purposes.

    • Re:Interesting, but not that useful (Score:4, Insightful)

      by zulux ( 112259 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @07:06PM (#8640142) Homepage Journal
      If you felt paranoid enough to need quantumly generated random numbers, would you really get the numbers over the internet from an untrusted source?

      Even if this source of randomness is compromised, adding it to your already existing sources of randomness coulden't hurt. It's best to layer sources of randomness on top of each other - so if one source or two isen't random, the whole stack of randomness isen't compromised.

    • Even if you trust the source, how do you guarantee that your data isn't compromised or sniffed before getting to your application? You could use SSL or IPSec, but if you're paranoid enough to want "truly random" numbers, you probably wouldn't be satisfied with the security those technologies afford.

    • Digital communication simulations need very good RNG sources, especially when simulating concatenated codes that result in very low BER. I have lost weeks worth of work because of bad and misrepresented generators.

  • How to listen to real random noise. (Score:4, Funny)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @06:58PM (#8640081) Homepage Journal
    generate a few screens of random numbers, use a range of 0-255 and generate 1000 numbers.

    open up a text editor and paste the results in, repeat the process several times till you have a nice big file of random numbers. Then simply

    %> cat randomnumbers.txt /dev/dsp

    its an interesting noise , i think you will agree ...

    nick ...
    • There's a simpler way...
      cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp
    • It won't really be all that random because the file would likely just contain ASCII characters 10 (LF), 32 (space), and 48-59 ('0' through '9'). And even the characters won't be randomly distributed, as there'll be a significant bias towards '1', and to a lesser extent, '2'.

      But anyway I guess I'm not disputing that it'll sound interesting! :-)

      I think I'll try that when I get home, out of curiosity.

  • use Net::RandomNumbers.info qw(:all);

    my @firstgroup = connect('arraysize' => '90',
    'range' => '1 1000',
    );

    foreach $linein ( @firstgroup ) {
    print "$linein \n";
    }

    exit 0;

    # Please wait ... connecting to your PayPal Account, please have your password ready
  • Unless one can control the actual mechanism for generation of random numbers, then they cannot guarantee that some 'man in the middle' will generate the 'random' numbers for you.

  • Cool! (Score:3)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @07:09PM (#8640167) Homepage
    A random.org [random.org] clone!

    Yes, I know the numbers are generated in a different way, but they're still random. Is the quantum angle the reason for the wow factor here?
  • This may have lots of physics geeks saying wow ...

    But where are the Lava Lamps to get the mundanes interested????

  • What about Hotbits? (Score:5, Informative)

    by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @07:32PM (#8640382) Homepage
    Last I checked HotBits [fourmilab.ch] was still in the random number business, using some radioactive sources.
    • Yeah, Hotbits have been serving up random numbers from a Krypton-85 source for years, also truly random. This is no Big News.
    • Peter Jackson already built a random hobbit generator.

      It worked ok for a while, then it started repeating..which made it clear it was not truly random. Altough, Elijah tried to fake it by saying random lines from the script whenever he forgot the real lines. Peter just left them in anyway.

      "Sam, don't you miss the Shire?"

      "I sure do, Mr. Frodo...I sure do."

  • In order to make the random numbers useable for security, they need to offer a service via an encrypted channel with a published certificate so that applications can ensure that no man-in-the-middle is occuring. You'd still want to mix in some entropy of your own gathering, but this would be a good way to prime prngd or egd. Of course there is still the question of trust of the source. If a few independent services like this sprung up around the world a secure source of entropy would be the combination o
    • So you're advocating taking a truly random number scheme and using that as the seed for a non-truly random number generator.

      Good one, Einstein! Using truly random numbers for a traditional RNG does NOT make the output more random.

      -psy
      • No, you're missing the point. BTW, thanks for the Einstein complement.

        PRNGs cycle, and there are things you can do get around that, such as restarting them every so often or mixing in more entropy, but it is the initial entropy used to seed that is important.

        PRNGs being deterministic means that it's very, very important that you start the sequence from a random point each time; an unguessable point in the sequence. Using pure random data to seed a PRNG will make it's use more secure.

        Think of the digits

  • Good for WEP keys (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Monday March 22, 2004 @08:10PM (#8640610) Homepage Journal
    I got a hexidecimal random file a few years ago and randomly selected a passage of characters for my 128 bit wep key. Much stronger than "DonotHACKME" as a passphrase. Still as weak as WEP, but since it's a low data rate network, and a fairly secure key then it's going to take weeks for someone to collect enough info to crack it. Then all they have is access to the internet and an XP computer with no ports open.

    But in general this type of resource is only good for small one off uses, research, and testing. They are providing it to see how good their distribution is, find problems with this type of setup before rolling out a for-pay service where you can have your own remote RNG. It would be good for laptop users who need an RNG that's more powerful than the dinky ones you can carry with you.

    -Adam
    • That's a cool idea... where'd you get the random hexes?
      • Aren't you the one hiding in the white van outside my house?

        I don't remember where I got them now. It's not hard to convert numbers from the website of the subject of this article into hex. Just ask for a bunch of numbers 0-16, then convert each number to its hex equivilant:

        15 2 15 14 13 3 14 10
        F2FED3EA

        -Adam
        • 0-15, I should have said. Get 26 of them for a full WEP key. In case you're wondering why a 128 bit key requires only 104 bits, here's a tidbit found through a quick search:

          To form the encryption key, 3 bytes (24 bits) are used from the 802.11b header for initialisation, with the remainder supplied by the user. So:
          64 bit key - user gives 40 bits = 10 hex digits or 5 characters
          128 bit key - user gives 104 bits = 26 hex digits or 13 characters
          256 bit key - user gives 232 bits = 58 hex digits or 29 cha

        • If you did that, the key is nowhere near "random". A better adjective might be "meaningless in terms of dictionary attacks".

          On a side note, it really doesn't matter what your WEP key is. Even if you used a quantum random number generator for your WEP key, it's pretty trivial for your neighbors to break it, sniff your traffic, inject traffic, etc. The code is out there for download, has been for a long time.

  • okay that was freaky... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Shaheen ( 313 ) on Monday March 22, 2004 @10:08PM (#8641400) Homepage
    i asked for one random number between 0 and 10000 and i got back my base rate salary.
  • Such an infinite sequence does for example contain the Microsoft Windows source code...

    I wonder what Bill Gates would do if he saw that.
  • 1. offer source of random numbers 2. keep local copy 3. crack each OTP generated by users 4. ... 5. PROFIT!

  • Who needs it? (Score:1, Troll)

    by ninja0 ( 764532 )
    Why bother making random data available for download when there's already plenty of slashdot posts?
  • If you want to have your own "real" random number source (not pseudo-random), have a look at LavaRND [lavarnd.org], which make use of a simple webcam as a random noise source.
  • From the Generating Random Numbers [randomnumbers.info] page:

    Contrary to the case where classical physics is used as the source of randomness and where determinism is hidden behind complexity, one can say that with quantum physics randomness is revealed by simplicity.

    Anyone who's studied Quantum Physics and doesn't see that the innate quality of the randomness is a presumed conclusion just wasn't paying enough attention.

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