Abstract
Randomness is a hot topic in computer science due to its important implications such as cryptography, gambling, hashing algorithms and so on. Due to the implicit determinism of computer systems, randomness can only be simulated. In order to generate reliable random sequences, IT systems have to rely on hardware random number generators. Unfortunately, these devices are not always affordable and suitable in all the circumstances (e.g., personal use, data-intensive systems, mobile devices, etc.). Human-computer interaction (HCI) has recently become bidirectional: computers help human beings in carrying out their issues and human beings support computers in hard tasks. Following this trend, we introduce RandomDB, a database system that is able to generate reliable randomness from social phenomena. RandomDB extracts data from social networks to answer random queries in a flexible way. We prototyped RandomDB and we conducted some experiments in order to show the effectiveness and the advantages of the system.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bassham III, L.E., Rukhin, A.L., Soto, J., Nechvatal, J.R., Smid, M.E., Barker, E.B., Leigh, S.D., Levenson, M., Vangel, M., Banks, D.L., Heckert, N.A., Dray, J.F., Vo, S.: A statistical test suite for random and pseudorandom number generators for cryptographic applications. SP 800-22 Rev. 1a (2010)
Boyar, J.: Inferring sequences produced by pseudo-random number generators. J. ACM 36(1), 129–141 (1989)
Chen, J.: The Physical Foundation of Economics: An Analytical Thermodynamic Theory. World Scientific Publishing Company (2005)
Dorrendorf, L., Gutterman, Z., Pinkas, B.: Cryptanalysis of the random number generator of the windows operating system. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur. 13(1) (2009)
Franklin, M.J., Kossmann, D., Kraska, T., Ramesh, S., Xin, R.: CrowdDB: answering queries with crowdsourcing. In: SIGMOD, pp. 61–72 (2011)
Galam, S.: Sociophysics: A Physicist’s Modeling of Psycho-political Phenomena. Springer (2012)
Halprin, R., Naor, M.: Games for extracting randomness. In: SOUPS (2009)
La Cerra, P.: The First Law of Psychology is the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The Energetic Evolutionary Model of the Mind and the Generation of Human Psychological Phenomena. Human Nature Review 3, 440–447 (2003)
L’Ecuyer, P., Simard, R.J.: TestU01: A C library for empirical testing of random number generators. ACM Trans. Math. Softw. 33(4) (2007)
Matsumoto, M., Nishimura, T.: Mersenne twister: A 623-dimensionally equidistributed uniform pseudo-random number generator. ACM Trans. Model. Comput. Simul. 8(1), 3–30 (1998)
Maurer, U.M.: A universal statistical test for random bit generators. J. Cryptology 5(2), 89–105 (1992)
de Raadt, T., Hallqvist, N., Grabowski, A., Keromytis, A.D., Provos, N.: Cryptography in openbsd: An overview. In: USENIX Annual Technical Conference, FREENIX Track, pp. 93–101 (1999)
Rapoport, A., Budescu, D.V.: Randomization in Individual Choice Behavior. Psychological Review 104(3), 603–617 (1997)
Saito, T., Ishii, K., Tatsuno, I., Sukagawa, S., Yanagita, T.: Randomness and genuine random number generator with self-testing functions (2010), http://csrc.nist.gov/rng/rng2.html
Von Ahn, L., Maurer, B., McMillen, C., Abraham, D., Blum, M.: reCAPTCHA: Human-based character recognition via web security measures. Science 321(5895), 1465–1468 (2008)
Yilek, S., Rescorla, E., Shacham, H., Enright, B., Savage, S.: When private keys are public: Results from the 2008 Debian OpenSSL vulnerability. In: Proceedings of IMC 2009, pp. 15–27. ACM Press (November 2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
De Virgilio, R., Maccioni, A. (2013). Generation of Reliable Randomness via Social Phenomena. In: Cuzzocrea, A., Maabout, S. (eds) Model and Data Engineering. MEDI 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8216. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41366-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41366-7_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41365-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41366-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)