The Distributed Entropy Service

(In no way whatsoever endorsed, encouraged or entertained by any intelligence agencies anywhere)

What is the distributed entropy service?

Random numbers are quite difficult to produce, and when you do succeed in doing so most of the time you don't actually want the damn things. Of course, this is somewhat irritating when you actually want to generate some PGP keys or plot to take over the world, and not everybody has a nice video camera pointing at a fishtank in order to produce more of them. In an attempt to balance this, we at the Distributed Entropy Service (DES) are doing our bit to increase security by extending the idea of distributed processing (as seen in the SETI at Home project, for instance) to distributed generation and distribution of entropy. Users simply run a client on their local machine that sends random numbers to our central server, which then proceeds to distribute these random numbers to those who need them.

How do I use the Distributed Entropy Service?

If you wish to contribute entropy to the Distributed Entropy Service, simply send random numbers to port 12345 on www.srcf.ucam.org. One handy way of doing this is with netcat - the following command will do the trick

nc </dev/random kern.srcf.ucam.org 12345

If you wish to utilise random numbers from the Distributed Entropy Service, visit our patented distribution mechanism. By bringing together the best features of our award winning proprietary technology and some of the best interoperability engineers on the planet, we have successfully allowed this secret and potentially lucrative development to be operated by a standard web browser. If you need random data piped to stdout, the curl command will do this for you.

Why are you doing this?

In order to help the Internet community, and because we've heard that distributed services are the way to make large quantities of money. Not because we want everyone to be using random numbers we can monitor. Obviously.

DES - improving your security


Matthew Garrett