[onerng talk] Another source of seed data ...

[Paul Campbell]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2016 03:04:47 Peter Gutmann wrote:
> This is for a publicly-verifiable source of randomness rather than a secure 
> PRNG, and it's mostly a clever-gimmick idea (as are many others of this
> form).  An easier-to-work-with one would be to use a fixed historical
> document (your favourite bit of Shakespeare, the Gettysburg address,
> something ascribed to Confucius, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
> cthulhu fhtagn, whatever) to seed a PRNG.

I think the important difference here is that you can't pick and choose a seed 
that suits you (maybe Othello happens to make a particularly trivial curve) - 
instead you nominate ahead of time a bunch of verifiable lotteries before they 
happen, seal your choices a bunch of ways with a verifiable timestamp (like in 
the blockchain), wait for the draws then use them - this way you don't know 
the actual numbers before you choose their sources and can't game the result 
by choosing ones that suit you

but yes it is a bit of a gimmick - but it does assume that nation-states can't 
game the results of their national lotteries ....

	Paul