Verifiable, Autonomous, Consistent, and Unpredictable Randomness
CLCERT Randomness Beacon
Get Randomness

Applications

Different Applications that our beacon enables or will enable in the future.

Education

The Chilean Primary Education System must produce a fair and random assignment of the new students in each of the schools in Chile. Random numbers generated by this beacon may be used to produce a unpredictable yet verifiable student assignment.

Public Auditing

La Contraloría General de la República (the Comptroller General of the Republic of Chile) is the main public agency in Chile in charge of auditing government officials. The process must be fair so officials are selected at random. We are currently working with them to provide a fair public, unpredictable yet verifiable random selection using this beacon.

Science Simulations

Many science simulations need a random set of data following a certain distribution (Poisson, Normal, etc). Verifiable random numbers following these distribution can be created using this beacon, allowing the replication of the published scientific results which involve randomized trials.

Miscellaneous

Our beacon can be used in practically any application that requires trustworthy public randomness. Need to pick a random number between 1 and 100? Need to select 10 persons out of 50 randomly? Need to learn about all your congress representatives, say by learning about a random congresman/congresswoman every day?

How It Works

Simple step-by-step explanation of the one minute randomness generation.

  • 00'' - 30''

    Entropy Collection

    During the first half of the current minute a process of recollection of entropy is carried out, obtaining data from several sources that provide random data (earthquakes, twitter, ethereum blockchain, online radio stations).

  • 30''

    Local Random Value Generation

    A local random value is generated using a local RNG hardware in CLCERT's data center. This value must be commited to using a hash function. This commitment is published in the current minute and the commited value (the plaintext) is used in the next minute.

  • 30'' - 55''

    Slow Hashing and Signature

    All the previous values (plus some other ones) are signed by CLCERT. This signature then is processed by an slow hash function which takes around 25 seconds to generate a digest.

  • 60''

    Randomness Available

    Finally the digest value generated before (512 bits) is published as the randomness value generated in the current minute and available for all the community from that moment.

  • Use the
    Random
    Number

Docs

Docs explaining the project with more detail.

Project Official Launch
Presentation (pdf, spanish)

July 2018

Team CLCERT

The current team developing the CLCERT Randomness Beacon.

Alejandro Hevia

Principal Investigator

Camilo Gómez

Main Engineer and Developer

Cristián Rojas

Software Security Engineer

Constanza Csori

Graduate Student Researcher

Sergio Miranda

Network Engineer

The CLCERT Randomness Beacon project is funded by the 2016 Grant Program of The Information Techonology Laboratory (ITL): NIST Grant Summary 2016