No, I’m arguing that the inputs aren’t knowable to the required degree in the general case, which defines their entropy, and that entropy isn’t mathematically lost, it’s improved through deterministic calculations.
No, I’m arguing that the inputs aren’t knowable to the required degree in the general case, which defines their entropy, and that entropy isn’t mathematically lost, it’s improved through deterministic calculations.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
The same was thought about previous iterations on random number generators. The first I am aware of used an extremely precise time stamp, and ran the calculations on that. On the assumption that no one could possibly know the exact timestamp used. That was obviously untrue, which can be verified by the fact that such systems have been broken before.
Just because you can’t conceive of a way to know the values, does not make them unknowable. It just makes it improbable to happen.
And again, I’m not saying the random numbers we can produce now are currently breakable. But that doesn’t mean that a decade from now, or even a century, they will remain unbroken.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Say I’m restarting my phone, and it uses details like temperature fluctuations in CPU sensors as entropy. How would you know all the required values? Since I’m holding the phone in my hand, the temperature of my hand (and consequently body temperature) are relevant, not to mention the air around my phone. How would you find those values at the exact time the sensors are read?
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
You honestly think those values aren’t possible to estimate within a range then brute force?
That’s like asking “say I hit a button at a very specific time, how would you find that exact time?”
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yes, because 1) you’d need to know them with incredible precision, and 2) you can’t brute force, because you only have one chance. Otherwise you can also brute force anything that’s “truly random” as you put it.
That’s the thing, it’s not like that. It’s more like “say I hit a button at a very specific time and roll hundreds of dice, how would I find that exact time and all the results of those dice”.