Ant Farm Entropy: Sugar Powered Encryption

YOW! Melbourne 2024

Randomness is essential for important applications such as the encryption of information. We know computers are bad at generating randomness, therefore much effort has been put into finding strategies to do this reliably and securely. These strategies can range from clever, to complex, to just outright silly. In this talk, we'll cover a research project that aims to answer the question of whether an ant colony can serve as a source for seeding OpenSSL's random number generator. The process, challenges, and findings will be candidly discussed, with something in this presentation for everyone to take away.