SPQR Week #2

Gathering Randomness from Online Sources:

Our project will be to examine different sources of entropy that can be used to provide cryptographically secure random bits. There are a number of online sources that will provide random bits, generated from a number of sources. Although such online sources should not be used for sensitive purposes, they are useful for examining the sources from which they reportedly gather entropy. With this intention, I have written four scripts to gather random bits from the following four online sources:

HotBits: Entropy gather from "timing successive pairs of radioactive decays detected by a Geiger-         

              Müller tube interfaced to a computer."

random.org: Entropy gathered from atmospheric noise

EntropyPool: Entropy gathered from "local processes, files and devices, Web page hits and remote

                      Web sites"

randomnumbers.info: Entropy gathered from a quantum photon detector.

Hypothesis testing and cryptographic math:

Having completed the previous task, I spent the rest of the week brushing up on some math. A large part of this project will be testing various entropy sources to see if the resulting random but streams are in fact random. This will be done mainly with the aid of several software packages, mainly the NIST test suite. However, its been over a year since I took statistics, so I spent some time brushing up on hypothesis testing so that I will be able to understand the tests when we begin applying them.

I also continued to read up on the basics of cryptography. I spent some time this week working through some of the math behind some of the encryption schemes and making sure that I understood how they work.