Re: Alpha Particles and One Time Pads

Tim May sez: Here's a posting I just sent to sci.crypt, dealing with using alpha particle sources as noise sources for generating one-time pads. Tim, Why not use a back-biased germanium diode, or other noisy semiconductor junction? Seriously, the NRC has allowed the smoke detector people to spread those little radioactive chunks of Americium for too long. John Walker of AutoDesk actually built an IBM-PC card that generated random numbers from a radioactive source. All the best, ^M