
Cloudflare launches League of Entropy: distributed random number generator - guyhance
https://blog.cloudflare.com/league-of-entropy/
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PhantomGremlin
I love the general idea, but I'm not really impressed by some of the
implementations. E.g. one of them uses /dev/urandom, another uses ChaCha20.
So, e.g., how did the ChaCha20 generator get seeded? If you know the initial
seed, don't you know the output for all time?

There's a guy on the net who has been generating hardware random numbers for
perhaps 23 years, using radioactive decay. All things equal, I'd trust that
method over ChaCha20.
[https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/)

And when I saw EPFL (i.e. people from Switzerland) I immediately thought of ID
Quantique. They are a Swiss company that sell an RNG that attempts to exploit
quantum effects. They send individual photons at a semi-transparent mirror and
detect whether those photons are transmitted or reflected. If the hardware is
implemented correctly, that seems pretty darn random.
[https://www.idquantique.com/random-number-
generation/product...](https://www.idquantique.com/random-number-
generation/products/quantis-random-number-generator/)

But the League of Entropy guys from Switzerland chose /dev/urandom instead of
quantum mechanics. Exactly whose /dev/urandom output? Is is a desktop computer
sitting on some guy's desk? The Cloudflare article linked to EPFL, not to the
specific project. It's like saying "we get our random bits from MIT". Huh? MIT
is a big school. Exactly where at MIT?

