Fast Random Bit Generation
Science has a paper (and commentary) on generating 250 random terabits per second with a laser. I don’t know how cryptographically secure they are, but that can be cleaned up with something like Fortuna.
EDITED TO ADD (3/12): Here are free versions of the paper and the commentary.
Curious • March 11, 2021 7:20 AM
I am not comfortable writing this below, but I just can’t help but get these whacky ideas. And not knowing much about cryptography it oddly enough makes making such ideas easy for me.
I wonder: could it be possible to create a finger printing system, using a lot of dynamic XOR gates when processing a huge string of random bits? Admittedly, it isn’t clear to me if my vague notion of XOR games even makes sense. I guess, it could mean the same thing as if an observer covertly recorded the stream of numbers in some indirect and clever way, also in any later step in which the random number is processed or maybe re-processed (maybe like when processed in a dedicated computer chip used for encryption/decryption?).
Uh, I guess there would be two ways to think of a ‘fingerprint’ in this way, one being, recognizing somebody’s encrypted signature (signatures as such not supposed to be secret?), and also maybe for sort of recording or at least learning something about the very number used as a random number.
I guess I sort of imagined that, even if you had a seemingly endless stream of random bit numbers going through a lot of XOR gates, then perhaps you could create a finger printing system by predictably shuffling the XOR gates around during the same processing of the initial burst of random stream of bits into the XOR gates? Maybe similar to how bits are processed in permutation boxes with software? Chunks of bits being shuffled and re-shuffled around in ways?
I guess I am now wondering: might there be there any big no-no’s when it comes to working with XOR gates when processing bits of data?
I am ofc speaking from ignorance here, and I suspect if I really knew all there was to know about XOR gates, I wouldn’t have any fun writing this.