Could a truly random number be generated using pings to pseudo-randomly selected IP addresses?

Question

The question posed came about during a 2nd Year Comp Science lecture while discussing the impossibility of generating numbers in a deterministic computational device.

Th

Answer 1

I guess you could. A couple things to watch out for:

• Even if pinging random IP addresses, the first few hops (from you to the first real L3 router in the ISP network) will be the same for every packet. This puts a lower bound on the round trip time, even if you ping something in a datacenter in that first Point of Presence. So you have to be careful about normalizing the timing, there is a lower bound on the round trip.
• You'd also have to be careful about traffic shaping in the network. A typical leaky bucket implementation in a router releases N bytes every M microseconds, which effectively perturbs your timing into specific timeslots rather than a continuous range of times. So you might need to discard the low order bits of your timestamp.

However I would disagree with the premise that there are not good sources of entropy in commodity hardware. Many x86 chipsets for the last few years have included random number generators. The ones I am familiar with use relatively sensitive ADCs to measure temperature in two different locations on the die, and subtract them. The low order bits of this temperature differential can be shown (via Chi-squared analysis) to be strongly random. As you increase the processing load on the system the overall temperature goes up, but the differential between two areas of the die remains uncorrelated and unpredictable.