• @FooBarrington
    link
    21 year ago

    Say I’m restarting my phone, and it uses details like temperature fluctuations in CPU sensors as entropy. How would you know all the required values? Since I’m holding the phone in my hand, the temperature of my hand (and consequently body temperature) are relevant, not to mention the air around my phone. How would you find those values at the exact time the sensors are read?

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      11 year ago

      You honestly think those values aren’t possible to estimate within a range then brute force?

      That’s like asking “say I hit a button at a very specific time, how would you find that exact time?”

      • @FooBarrington
        link
        11 year ago

        Yes, because 1) you’d need to know them with incredible precision, and 2) you can’t brute force, because you only have one chance. Otherwise you can also brute force anything that’s “truly random” as you put it.

        That’s like asking “say I hit a button at a very specific time, how would you find that exact time?”

        That’s the thing, it’s not like that. It’s more like “say I hit a button at a very specific time and roll hundreds of dice, how would I find that exact time and all the results of those dice”.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          11 year ago

          Apart from the face that there are absolutely no “dice rolls” involved. They are known deterministic calculations. Because in order to add “dice rolls” you would need randomness. You can’t have a non deterministic calculation involved, because that isn’t how computers work.

          You’re essentially saying “take a knowable input, add true randomness, output true randomness using nothing but knowable inputs!”

          And you absolutely can brute force it. Why would you have a single chance? Because of arbitrary rules?

          As for true randomness, you’re getting a range of “extreme low to extreme high” which isn’t currently brute forcible.

          • @FooBarrington
            link
            1
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            My dude, the “dice rolls” are all the small pieces of entropy that you’d have to know the environment to an unknowable degree for. They are conceptually absolutely involved, and if you can’t understand that, we’re done here, because you’re handwaving over the difficult parts in a way that doesn’t make sense.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              11 year ago

              Those “dice rolls” are not random though. The problem is you keep talking about these inputs as if they themselves are random. They aren’t. And just because you can’t fathom a way to know their values now, doesn’t mean they are unknowable. I point back to the timestamp issue, where at the time it was considered “enough” but was disproven as such years down the line.