{"id":35410,"date":"2019-10-31T22:04:10","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T19:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/blog\/cloudflare-predstavil-raspredelyonnyj-generator-sluchajnyh-chisel\/"},"modified":"2019-10-31T22:04:10","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T19:04:10","slug":"cloudflare-predstavil-raspredelyonnyj-generator-sluchajnyh-chisel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/en\/blog\/news\/cloudflare-predstavil-raspredelyonnyj-generator-sluchajnyh-chisel","title":{"rendered":"Cloudflare has introduced a distributed random number generator","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"

Cloudflare introduced<\/a><\/noindex> service League of Entropy<\/a><\/noindex>, for the operation of which a consortium of several organizations has been formed, interested in providing high-quality random numbers. Unlike existing centralized systems, League of Entropy does not rely on a single source and uses entropy from obtained<\/a><\/noindex> from several independent generators controlled by different project participants. Thanks to the distributed nature of the project, the compromise or tampering of one or two sources will not lead to the compromise of the final random number. <\/p>\n

It should be noted that the generated random numbers belong to the category of publicly available sequences, which cannot be used for generating encryption keys and in areas where random numbers must remain confidential. The service aims to provide random numbers that cannot be predicted in advance, but once generated, these numbers become publicly available, including for verifying the authenticity of past random values. <\/p>\n

Public random numbers are generated every 60 seconds. Each number is linked to its sequence number (round), which can be used to retrieve any previously generated value from any participating server at any time. Such random numbers can be used in distributed systems, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains, where different nodes need access to a single random number generator (for example, when creating proof of work), as well as in conducting various lotteries and for generating random samples in the process of election audits.<\/p>\n

To interact with the service and to deploy your own nodes introduced<\/a><\/noindex> toolkit Drand<\/a><\/noindex>, written in Go and provided under the MIT license. Drand runs as a background process that connects to participating external generators in the distributed network and collectively forms a consolidated random value. The consolidated value is generated using methods of threshold cryptography<\/a><\/noindex> and pairing-based cryptography<\/a><\/noindex>The generation of a summary random value can be performed on the user's system without involving centralized aggregators.<\/p>\n

Drand can also be used for delivering locally generated private random numbers to clients. An ECIES encryption scheme is employed for transmitting the random number, whereby the client generates a private and a public key. The public key is sent to the Drand server. The random number is encrypted using this public key and can only be viewed by the client possessing the private key. The utility 'drand' can be used to interact with the servers (for example, 'drand get public group.toml', where group.toml is the list of nodes to query) or through the Web API (for instance, using 'curl https:\/\/drand.cloudflare.com\/api\/public' or through JavaScript with a library). DrandJS<\/a><\/noindex>). The request metadata is sent in TOML format, and the response is provided in JSON.<\/p>\n

Currently, five companies and organizations have joined the League of Entropy initiative, providing access to their entropy generators. The participants in the project are located in different countries and use various methods of obtaining entropy:<\/p>\n