I found this article interesting.
https://www.cloudflare.com/lea...ava-lamp-encryption/

quote:

… To produce the unpredictable, chaotic data necessary for strong encryption, a computer must have a source of random data. The "real world" turns out to be a great source for randomness, because events in the physical world are unpredictable.

As one might expect, lava lamps are consistently random. The "lava" in a lava lamp never takes the same shape twice, and as a result, observing a group of lava lamps is a great source for random data. …

This strategy was incorporated into an episode of NCIS. I thought it may have been a fabrication.

Interesting.
There was an episode of NCIS featuring this concept of lava lamps and encryption.



Edit to add. bettysnephew beat me to it.

I am generally good with math, but pretty ignorant about computer and data systems.

I understand how a lava lamp provides randomness for a strong encryption. I don’t understand how that newly generated random encryption key is stored so it can be used to decrypt later, or how it would be transmitted to a second party that needed to decrypt the info.

So all the AI clusters in the world will be using lava lamps as their RNG? I don't think so, for no other reason than the power consumption (Lava lamps use heat to work). Maybe the heat source would be the CPU itself? In that case, I wonder how long it would take for the AI to learn to manage the RNG?

Skynet is already here, it just isn't aware of "us" yet.

quote:

Originally posted by honestlou:
I am generally good with math, but pretty ignorant about computer and data systems.

I understand how a lava lamp provides randomness for a strong encryption. I don’t understand how that newly generated random encryption key is stored so it can be used to decrypt later, or how it would be transmitted to a second party that needed to decrypt the info.

Do a search for "public key encryption." This depends on equations/calculations that are computationally easy to execute, but hard to deduce. You have two keys, each of which can uniquely decrypt data that is encrypted by the other. So you can freely give out the public key as long as you keep the private key to yourself. Anything that can be decrypted by the public key is certain to have been encrypted by a specific private key, and vice versa. So two entities that have each other's public keys (and have not lost control of their own private keys) can communicate securely with one another.

In practice the encryption is usually done twice, once with the sender's private key (this proves who it is from, AKA non-repudiation), and again with the recipient's public key (which only he can decrypt {with his private key}). Whole systems of enabling software have been developed to facilitate this capability, the major open source contenders being PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and S/MIME (Secure Multimedia Mail Exchange). The notion of Certificates uses this as well, with the public key being encapsulated in the certificate, and the private key a separate object.

Most reasonable mailers make this easy, almost transparent, with the major additional effort on the user's part being key management. However, you only have to deal with key management for a particular correspondent once, so it isn't the insurmountable barrier many users seem to think it is. What is hard is explaining to your correspondent what they have to do on their end to make it happen.

Besides being too cumbersome, the data rate of random number production by a lava lamp is too low.

Quantum noise produced by a reverse biased p-n junction is a much better method. See “quantum mechanical tunneling of carriers through the bandgap” in this article:

http://holdenc.altervista.org/avalanche/

Back in university in the 90s we used pulsars to key off of for our random number generators

quote:

Originally posted by honestlou:
I am generally good with math, but pretty ignorant about computer and data systems.

I understand how a lava lamp provides randomness for a strong encryption. I don’t understand how that newly generated random encryption key is stored so it can be used to decrypt later, or how it would be transmitted to a second party that needed to decrypt the info.

I think I see two questions here:

1) the lava lamp or anything truly random is used because a computer program that generates random numbers isn’t truly random.

2) if I recall correctly the discussions from one of my classes, this is how it works: there’s a master key paired to one or possibly more than one encryption key. You can publish or give away the encryption key and tell people, “you want to send me a secure message, use this key to encrypt it and I’m the only one who can open the message.”

In a two way secure communication, the sender will use the encryption to send the sender’s encryption key to the recipient along with any verification information to confirm the sender’s identity. When that’s established, both parties can transmit messages to the other person using the other person’s encryption key and unlocking encrypted messages sent to them with their master key.

^^^^^
architect explained the process a couple of posts above.

ETA – usually a pseudo random number is sufficient. If not, then some physical process is used to generate a more random number.

In either case the number can then be fed into a secure hashing algorithm, such as SHA-n to produce a hash of some suitable length.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Pipe Smoker,

Not encryption, but for passwords:
I use DICEWARE to generate passwords. Randomness is generated by literally rolling dice.