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h2odragon parent
Ah, but is your sample still live enough to be "cryptographic grade" random? Is the hardware that measures the source and the software that reports it subject to any periodicity that you don't know about but your attackers might?

(Some) People who study this often get lost down the rabbit hole and come out thinking the universe is deterministic.


CaptainNegative
Any distribution with a sufficient amount of entropy can be turned into "cryptographic-grade" randomness source using randomness extractors [1]. These work independently of any outside factors that might be trying to sneak signal (e.g. periodicity) into the noise -- as long as you can prove there's sufficient entropy to start with, you're good to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_extractor

HelloNurse
Low-intensity radiation is random enough, but it's slow: your device is necessarily twiddling thumbs between a detected event and the next, and entropy is mostly proportional to the number of events (for example, almost n bits from what of 2^n identical units is hit by the next particle).
eternityforest
Once you get 16-48ish bytes depending on paranoia you can just rely on crypto
User23
Or, it's what one of my ex-NSA buddies told me: we almost never break the encryption, we break the implementation, because that's where the errors are.

The same can assuredly apply to capturing entropy.

LinuxBender
100% this. WEP WiFi was an infamous old example. The encryption was solid but the implementation was poor and could be easily broken.

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