For many decades the term “random numbers” meant “pseudo-random numbers” to anyone who thought much about the issue and understood that computers simply were not equipped to produce anything that was truly random. Manufacturers did what they could, grabbing some signals from the likes of mouse movement, keyboard activity, system interrupts, and packet collisions just to get a modest sampling of random data to improve the security of their cryptographic processes. And the bad guys worked at breaking the encryption. We used longer keys and better algorithms. And the bad guys kept at it. And life went on.
But something has only recently changed all that. No, not yesterday or last week. But it was only back in November of last year that something called the Entropy Engine won an Oscar of Innovation award for collaborators Los Alamos National Laboratory and Whitewood Security. This Entropy Engine is capable of delivering as much as 350 Mbps of true random numbers – sufficient to feed an entire data center with enough random data to dramatically improve all cryptographic processes. Tapping into the quantum physics of matter and light to provide a source of entopy, the Entropy Engine produces numbers that:
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