Page 1 of 1
Science has a paper (and commentary) on generating 250 random terabits per second with a laser. I don’t know how cryptographically secure they are, but that can be cleaned up with something like Fortuna.
EDITED TO ADD (3/12): Here are free versions of the paper and the commentary.
Providing random numbers on computers can be very difficult. Back in 2003, Niels Ferguson and I designed Fortuna as a secure PRNG. Particularly important is how it collects entropy from various processes on the computer and mixes them all together.
While Fortuna is widely used, there hadn’t been any real analysis of the system. This has now changed. A new paper by Yevgeniy Dodis, Adi Shamir, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz, and Daniel Wichs provides some theoretical modeling for entropy collection and PRNG. They analyze Fortuna and find it good but not optimal, and then provide their own optimal system.
Excellent, and long-needed, research.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.