by John Senay
What is all the fuss about Random Numbers and how they are generated? What do Random Numbers provide anyway? I know that’s how they pick the winning Lotto numbers.
Cryptography and Encryption use Random Numbers as their most basic building block. Without Random Numbers, Encryption would not be possible. Ghost PII would not be possible, and that would be very bad!
How can you get Random Numbers for the cryptography used in Ghost PII?
Well…you could use an algorithm to create “random” numbers, but research has shown that in certain instances, algorithms can be attacked and cracked. If the researchers have done it once, you know that the researchers will do it again, so Capnion does not use algorithms alone to generate Random Numbers!
What about hardware Random Number generators that utilize the “white noise” a PC produces while running? That is a possibility, but there are humans involved. We have all heard about the attempted and successful backdoors put into hardware by various unscrupulous parties. Not good enough for Ghost PII!!
Then how can you create true Random Numbers? One way is to use the white noise created by the earth’s atmosphere. That’s a great idea! Turn on the radio and feed the static (white noise) into the sound card and create Random Numbers. Maybe, but the earth is so finite. Not good enough for Ghost PII.
All of my life, I have wondered what is out “THERE.” You go out on a clear night, look up in any direction, and you are looking at infinity. Look through a telescope and what you see is a piece of the infinite, infinity. Wow! to this day I still cannot fully comprehend infinity of the Universe. It’s big, but it’s home!
How to use the infinite infinity to generate Random Numbers?
Capnion goes out to a Top Secret location and takes high resolution pictures of the night sky. Capnion calls this process Starlight.
The night sky is always changing due to changes in the atmosphere and even in the light that is arriving from the stars in the sky. The furthest star you can see with the naked eye is V762 Cas in Cassiopeia at 16,308 light-years away! When you look at V762, some of that twinkle you see is 16,308 years old!!
The high resolution pictures are digitized and the Random Numbers that Ghost PII uses for Encryption are generated from the tiny changes in this data.
Using Starlight to generate Random Numbers for Ghost PII, is out of this world, its truly COSMIC!!
Look for some photos on the website for a Starlight event.
Thanks for reading!!