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Spying is big business, and avoiding being spied on an even bigger one. So imagine if someone came up with a simple, cheap way of encrypting messages that is almost impossible to hack into?
American computer engineer Laszlo Kish at Texas A&M University in College Station claims to have done just that. He says the thermal properties of a simple wire can be exploited to create a secure communications channel, one that outperforms quantum cryptography keys.
Ohhh ... random, noise-generated encryption keys! Sure beats PGP. And easier to use than a stack of lava lamps! :)
Tell us more about these lava lamps, comrade.
LavaRnd.org [lavarnd.org] is carrying on the original "lavarand generator" work started by Silicon Graphics, however they have abandoned the use of lava lamps.
Essentially, any of these technologies needs a random "seed" from which to generate their encryption's key. The "noise from the line" approach gets its random seed by sampling a little of the noise generated by a transmission line, which varies from moment to moment depending on the temperature, traffic on the line and other factors that together create a truly random environment.
The "lavarand generator" was a group of 8 lava lamps, set on a shelf. Whenever the folks at SGI needed a random seed, they would take a digital photo of the lamps which, at that precise moment, were each in a pretty random state. Since predicting how the bubbles in a lava lamp flow is statistically impossible, and then multiplying that randomness by the 8 lamps, the digital photo provided a pretty good random seed when fed into the hash generating program that analyzed the photo's data.
[edited by: StupidScript at 8:55 pm (utc) on June 5, 2007]
