Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Physicist Develops Process to Create Random Numbers

By Oliver David


A Canadian physicist lately created a technique to generate a set of random numbers, which will benefit the information security business. This procedure for producing random numbers is important to encrypting information to ensure that hackers can’t determine what a password is.

The physicist, Ben Sussman who is a scientist at Ottawa’s National Research Council builds quantum technologies. Sussman found that at the tiny (or quantum) scale of photons and electrons, events don’t follow human’s familiar ideas of cause and effect. In fact, the events happen in completely random ways.

For those in the data security industry who want to encrypt data, this methodology is a potential source of randomly selected numbers that could be used as an encrypted key to lock and unlock sensitive materials such as military transmissions, financial transactions or person’s health data. The basis of Sussman’s methodology is that no one has a clue about how the actual key was created (since it is completely random based on photons and neutrons. Since the key is random, hackers and code-breakers wouldn’t be able to figure out the secret and decode the messages. Usb protection is something that many companies struggle with when it comes to data security.

Sussman’s new idea entails pulses of laser light, which has the possible to make really random numbers in big quantities and at a quick rate. When commenting about his methodology, Sussman stated, “If you would like to defeat an adversary who's attempting to hack into your method, essentially you'll need big quantities of random numbers. This has the possible scale to extraordinarily quick rates, that is becoming more and more essential as info networks expand and you will find greater information rate

specifications.”

Sussman utilizes a pulse laser light that lasts a couple of trillionths of a second. The light shines at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out once more, but along the way it modifications. Sussman noted, “This out-coming light is extremely, extremely unique.” Usually, what occurs in objects in physics, a minimum of on the scale of objects that may be observed and observed, it's discovered that there really is not randomness to them. For instance, even a dice roll is not truly random. The laws of motion govern them. Sussman stated that the interactions altering the light are various. “What quantum mechanics tells us is the fact that it is against the laws of physics to know precisely what occurs.”




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment