From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 19:31:13 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: video as a source of public randomness
Message-ID: <acbf02ca0402100496c4@[205.199.118.202]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 6:23 AM 11/3/95, JMKELSEY@delphi.com wrote:

>>From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
>>Subject: Re: Video as a source of randomness
>
>>Digitized video input, especially from something like a noisy channel (t.v.
>>channel, for example), is quite likely to produce a lot more entropy bits
>>per second than nearly any of us ever need. (One's PGP key could be seeded
>>in a fraction of a millisecond, for example.)
>
>This seems like a potential source of a stream of public random
>bits.  If these can be authenticated and matched, this kind of thing
>can be useful in a lot of protocols.  For example, if there is some

I'm not sure what you mean by "public random bits"...I don't plan to share
my random bits with anyone, nor do I see any need for "public" random bits
(except for some well-known situations involving statistical testing, for
which certain PRNGs are actually preferable to "real" random numbers).

And so there's no confusion, when I said "like a noisy channel (t.v.
channel, for example)" I meant a snowy, noisy picture such as one gets with
rabbit ears on top of the set, especially when the channel is an unused
one. It is unlikely in the extreme that any attacker could deduce the snowy
pixel values used in the distillation of entropy.

(I'm not claiming this is the most practical source of randomness; I was
just responding to an earlier post about this.)

But back to the subject of "public random bits." Could you elaborate on
what you mean by this? (I assume you don't mean a one time pad that Alice
and Bob share, since that is really a separable issue from video as a
source of randomness. Only one of them will generate the pad, and will then
securely communicate it to the other.)

What am I missing?

--Tim May

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