True Random Number Generation Via Images

By: Alexander Mueller

As you may know, the random numbers generated by R commands are not truly random. We often view this as a feature and not a bug when we set a seed for the random number generator to ensure reproducible results. But for many cryptographic purposes this pseudo, rather than true, randomness is a significant liability.

There are a number of approaches to generating true random numbers, many of them involve basic image processing. For example, the twinkling of the stars is as random as one could ask, as it is really driven random turbulence in the atmosphere. We can access this randomness by analyzing a series of images of this star twinkling. I will walk through this and other examples using the imager package (https://cloud.r-project.org/package=imager) and apply the infotheo package (https://cloud.r-project.org/package=infotheo) to analyze the "volume" of randomness extracted.

The meetup will be held in the CIC building at 20 South Sarah Street, St. Louis, MO 63108. We will be in the Showroom. The building entrance is at the corner of Forest Park Avenue and Sarah Street. You can find directions at http://stl.cic.us/directions/ (CIC@CET).

We will meet for snacks, set-up, and conversation at 6:00PM. The presentation will start at 6:30PM and will be about 60 minutes long.