The quest for truly random numbers is something to which scientists and engineers have devoted a lot of time and effort. The trick is to find an unpredictable source of naturally occurring noise that can be sampled, so they have looked towards noisy gas discharge tubes or semiconductor junctions, and radioactive decay. Noisy electrical circuits have appeared in these pages before as random number generators, but we’d be forgiven for thinking that radioactive decay might involve something a little less run-of-the-mill. In fact we all probably have just such a device in our houses, in the form of the ionisation chamber that’s part of most household smoke detectors. [Lukas Koch] has built a project that shows us just how this can be done.
A smoke detector of this type uses a metal shell to house a tiny sample of radioactive americium that emits alpha particles into the space between two electrodes. These ionise the air in that space, and the detectable effect on the space between the two electrodes is increased when ionised gasses from smoke are present. However it can also quite happily detect the ionisation from individual alpha particles, which means that it’s perfect as a source of random noise. A sensitive current amplifier requires significant shielding to avoid the device merely becoming a source of mains hum, and to that end he’s achieved a working breadboard prototype.
This is still a work in progress and though it has as yet no schematic he promises us that it will arrive in due course. It’s a project that’s definitely worth watching, because despite getting more up-close and personal than most of us have with radioactive components, it’s one we’re genuinely interested to see come to fruition.
Randomness is a pursuit in a similar vein to metrology or time and frequency, in that inordinate quantities of effort can be expended in pursuit of its purest form. The Holy Grail is a source of completely unpredictable randomness, and the search for entropy so pure has taken experimenters into the sampling of lava lamps, noise sources, unpredictable timings of user actions in computer systems, and even into sampling radioactive decay. It’s a field that need not be expensive or difficult to work in, as [Henk Mulder] shows us with his 4-bit analogue random number generator.
One of the simplest circuits for generating random analogue noise involves a reverse biased diode in either Zener or avalanche breakdown, and it is a variation on this that he’s using. A reverse biased emitter junction of a transistor produces noise which is amplified by another transistor and then converted to a digital on-off stream of ones and zeroes by a third. Instead of a shift register to create his four bits he’s using four identical circuits, with no clock their outputs randomly change state at will.
A large part of his post is an examination of randomness and what makes a random source. He finds this source to be flawed because it has a bias towards logic one in its output, but we wonder whether the culprit might be the two-transistor circuit and its biasing rather than the noise itself. It also produces a sampling frequency of about 100 kbps, which is a little slow when sampling with he Teensy he’s using.
An understanding of random number generation is both a fascinating and important skill to have. We’ve featured so many RNGs over the years, here’s one powered by memes, and another by a fish tank.
We’re suckers for the Fallout aesthetic, so anything with a post-apocalyptic vibe is sure to get our attention. With a mid-century look, Nixie tubes, a brushed metal faceplate, and just a touch of radioactivity, this quantum random number generator pushes a lot of design buttons, and it pushes them hard.
Charmingly named “Chernobyl Dice”, this little gadget comes to us from [Nathan Griffith], and appears to be one of those “Why not?” builds we love so much. The heart of any random number generator is a source of entropy, for which [Nathan] chose to use six slightly radioactive uranium glass marbles. Those feature prominently in the front panel of the device, occasionally made to fluoresce with a few UV LEDs just because it looks cool. A Geiger tube inside the case is used to look for decay events from the marbles every millisecond. After some adjustment for the bias toward zeroes due to the relative rarity of decay events, the accumulated bits are displayed on eight Nixies. The box can be set to generate a stream of random numbers up to 31 bits long and send it over a USB port, or make random throws of a die with a settable number of sides. And when it’s not doing random stuff, it can just be a cool Nixie clock.
There are lots of ways to generate the entropy needed for truly random number generation, from a wall of lava lamps to bubbles in a fish tank. They’ve all got style, but something about this one just works.
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys talk turkey on the latest hacks. Random numbers, art, and electronic geekery combine into an entropic masterpiece. We saw Bart Dring bring new life to a cool little multi-pen plotter from the Atari age. Researchers at UCSD built a very very very slow soft robot, and a broken retrocomputer got a good dose of the space age. A 555 is sensing earthquakes, there’s an electric motor that wants to drop into any vehicle, and did you know someone used to have to read the current time into the telephone ad nauseam?
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Are you waiting for something that may never happen? Maybe it’s the end of your ennui, or the release of Half Life 3. While you wait, why not build a Godot Machine? Then you can diversify your portfolio and wait for two things that could happen today, tomorrow, or at sunrise on the 12th of Never.
The Godot Machine is a functional art piece that uses a solar panel and a joule thief to charge a bank of capacitors up to 5V. Whenever that happens, the Arduino comes online and generates a 20-bit random number, which is displayed on an LED bar. If the generated number matches the super-secret number that was generated at first boot and then stashed away in EEPROM, the Machine emits a victory beep and lights a green LED. Then you can go back to complaining about whatever.
We like that [kajnjaps] made his own chaos-based random number generator instead of just calling random(). It uses a guitar string to collect ambient electronic noise and an entropy generator to amplify it. Then the four least significant digits are used to seed the logistical map, so the initial value is always different.
Twitter is kind of a crazy place. World leaders doing verbal battle, hashtags that rise and fall along with the social climate, and a never ending barrage of cat pictures all make for a tumultuous stream of consciousness that runs 24/7. What exactly we’re supposed to do with this information is still up to debate, as Twitter has yet to turn it into a profitable service after over a decade of operation. Still, it’s a grand experiment that offers a rare glimpse into the human hive-mind for anyone brave enough to dive in.
One such explorer is a security researcher who goes by the handle [x0rz]. He’s recently unveiled an experimental new piece of software that grabs Tweets and uses them as a “noise” to mix in with the Linux urandom entropy pool. The end result is a relatively unpredictable and difficult to influence source of random data. While he cautions his software is merely a proof of concept and not meant for high security applications, it’s certainly an interesting approach to introducing humanity-derived chaos into the normally orderly world of your computer’s operating system.
Noise sampling before and after being merged with urandom
This hack is made possible by the fact that Twitter offers a “sample” function in their API, which effectively throws a randomized collection of Tweets at anyone who requests it. There are some caveats here, such as the fact that if multiple clients request a sample at the same time they will both receive the same Tweets. It’s also worth mentioning that some characters are unusually likely to make an appearance due to the nature of Twitter (emoticons, octothorps pound signs, etc), but generally speaking it’s not a terrible way to get some chaotic data on demand.
On its own, [x0rz] found this data to be a good but not great source of entropy. After pulling a 500KB sample, he found it had an entropy of 6.5519 bits per byte (random would be 8). While the Tweets weren’t great on their own, combining the data with the kernel’s entropy pool at /dev/urandom provided something that looked a lot less predictable.
The greatest weakness of using Twitter as a source of entropy is, of course, the nature of Twitter itself. A sufficiently popular hashtag on the rise might be just enough to sink your entropy. It’s even possible (though admittedly unlikely) that enough Twitter spam bots could ruin the sample. But if you’re at the point where you think hinging your entropy pool on a digital fire hose of memes and cat pictures is sufficient, you’re probably not securing any national secrets anyway.
(Editor’s note: The way the Linux entropy pool mixes it together, additional sources can only help, assuming they can’t see the current state of your entropy pool, which Twitter cats most certainly can’t. See article below. Also, this is hilarious.)
What do you do, when you need a random number in your programming? The chances are that you reach for your environment’s function to do the job, usually something like rand() or similar. This returns the required number, and you go happily on your way.
A shift register configured as a pseudo-random number generator. [by KCAuXy4p CC0 1.0]Except of course the reality isn’t quite that simple, and as many of you will know it all comes down to the level of randomness that you require. The simplest way to generate a random number in software is through a pseudo-random number generator, or PRNG. If you prefer to think in hardware terms, the most elementary PRNG is a shift register with a feedback loop from two of its cells through an XOR gate. While it provides a steady stream of bits it suffers from the fatal flaw that the stream is an endlessly repeating sequence rather than truly random. A PRNG is random enough to provide a level of chance in a computer game, but that predictability would make it entirely unsuitable to be used in cryptographic security for a financial transaction.
There is a handy way to deal with the PRNG predictability problem, and it lies in ensuring that its random number generation starts at a random point. Imagine the shift register in the previous paragraph being initialised with a random number rather than a string of zeros. This random point is referred to as the seed, and if a PRNG algorithm can be started with a seed derived from a truly unpredictable source, then its output becomes no longer predictable.
Selecting Unpredictable Seeds
Computer systems that use a PRNG will therefore often have some form of seed() function alongside their rand() function. Sometimes this will take a number as an argument allowing the user to provide their own random number, at other times they will take a random number from some source of their own. The Sinclair 8-bit home computers for example took their seed from a count of the number of TV frames since switch-on.
The not-very-random result of a thousand analogRead() calls.
The Arduino Uno has a random() function that returns a random number from a PRNG, and as you might expect it also has a randomSeed() function to ensure that the PRNG is seeded with something that will underpin its randomness. All well and good, you might think, but sadly the Atmel processor on which it depends has no hardware entropy source from which to derive that seed. The user is left to search for a random number of their own, and sadly as we were alerted by a Twitter conversation between @scanlime and @cybergibbons, this is the point at which matters start to go awry. The documentation for randomSeed() suggests reading the random noise on an unused pin via analogRead(), and using that figure does not return anything like the required level of entropy. A very quick test using the Arduino Graph example yields a stream of readings from a pin, and aggregating several thousand of them into a spreadsheet shows an extremely narrow distribution. Clearly a better source is called for.
Noisy Hardware or a Jittery Clock
As a slightly old-school electronic engineer, my thoughts turn straight to a piece of hardware. Source a nice and noisy germanium diode, give it a couple of op-amps to amplify and filter the noise before feeding it to that Arduino pin. Maybe you were thinking about radioactive decay and Geiger counters at that point, or even bouncing balls. Unfortunately though, even if they scratch the urge to make an interesting piece of engineering, these pieces of hardware run the risk of becoming overcomplex and perhaps a bit messy.
The significantly more random result of a thousand Arduino Entropy Library calls.
The best of the suggestions in the Twitter thread brings us to the Arduino Entropy Library, which uses jitter in the microcontroller clock to generate truly random numbers that can be used as seeds. Lifting code from the library’s random number example gave us a continuous stream of numbers, and taking a thousand of them for the same spreadsheet treatment shows a much more even distribution. The library performs as it should, though it should be noted that it’s not a particularly fast way to generate a random number.
So should you ever need a truly random number in your Arduino sketch rather than one that appears random enough for some purposes, you now know that you can safely disregard the documentation for a random seed and use the entropy library instead. Of course this comes at the expense of adding an extra library to the overhead of your sketch, but if space is at a premium you still have the option of some form of hardware noise generator. Meanwhile perhaps it is time for the Arduino folks to re-appraise their documentation.
One of the simplest circuits for generating random analogue noise involves a reverse biased diode in either Zener or avalanche breakdown, and it is a variation on this that he’s using. A reverse biased emitter junction of a transistor produces noise which is amplified by another transistor and then converted to a digital on-off stream of ones and zeroes by a third. Instead of a shift register to create his four bits he’s using four identical circuits, with no clock their outputs randomly change state at will.
