Cloudflare launches global service to generate random numbers streams

Cloudflare announced launching League of Entropy to generate random number streams that government and other organizations will be able to use in their applications.

Random numbers are a base modern cryptography, and to create secure applications, developers must have a resource that generates this randomness.

“The sampling of randomness securely and efficiently is a critical component of all modern computing systems”, — note developers League of Entropy service.

For most applications, such a resource is the device on which they are installed, be it an Android smartphone, a Linux server, etc. However, using one device as a source of entropy is very dangerous, since an attacker can compromise it and calculate entropy.

In the past, attempts have been made to create distributed sources of chance, all with varying degrees of success.

“It’s clear we need alternative methods for sampling randomness so that we can provide guarantees that trusted mechanisms, such as elections and lotteries, take place in secure tamper-resistant environments. The drand project was started by researchers at EPFL to address this problem. The drand charter is to provide an easily configurable randomness beacon running at geographically distributed locations around the world. The intention is for each of these beacons to generate portions of randomness that can be combined into a single random string that is publicly verifiable”, — explain their mission creators of League of Entropy.

Cloudflare League of Entropy is based on a network of five servers that generate protected random number streams. Each server generates its own stream, and these streams are then merged into one.

Even if attackers manage to crack one or two servers, the rest will continue to generate streams of random numbers with entropy, which cannot be calculated or changed.

Cloudflare itself, Protocol Labs, the University of Chile, the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, and Kudelski Security manage the five servers that are at the heart of League of Entropy. They all use different sources of entropy.

According to Cloudflare, the new service can be used in lotteries and blockchain, as well as to generate strong passwords, etc.

Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com