[onerng talk] another method of acquiring randomness

[Jim Cheetham]

The smartphone aspect is pure gimmick, of course - just highlighting
the fact that what we carry around in our pockets every day is in face
a very advanced general purpose system just used to send selfies to
the Internet ...

It's the whole aspect of counting electrons/photons that seems a
little delicate. They're profiling the CCD to work out how much light
to provide to just avoid saturating the array, and then assuming "even
illumination" any differences between pixels should represent the
unpredictability of the laser source. I don't see that as being very
robust outside a lab/sealed unit.

Still, probably a good source for the high-end RNGs. But never
practical on a personal phone ...

-jim


On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 7:50 AM, ianG <iang at iang.org> wrote:
> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/quantum-random-number-generator-created-using-a-smartphone-camera-602f88552b64
>
> Bruno Sanguinetti and pals at the University of Geneva in Switzerland
> have worked out how to generate random numbers on an ordinary smartphone
> using genuine quantum processes. And they say their new technique can
> produce random numbers at the rate of 1 megabit per second, more than
> enough for most security applications.
>
> The quantum process that these guys exploit is the way light sources
> emit photons. Because each emission is a quantum process, the instant of
> emission cannot be predicted. So the number of photons that a light
> source emits in a unit of time will always vary by an amount that is
> entirely random. ...
>
> --
>
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