The work on QRBG Service has been motivated by scientific necessity (primarily of local scientific community) of running various simulations (in cluster/Grid environments), whose results are often greatly affected by quality (distribution, nondeterminism, entropy, etc.) of used random numbers. Sincetrue random numbersare impossible to generate with a finite state machine (such as today's computers), scientists are forced to either use specialized expensive hardware number generators, or, more frequently, to content themselves with suboptimal solutions (like pseudo-random numbers generators).

The Service has begun as a result of an attempt to fulfill the scientists' needs for quality random numbers, but has now grown to a global (public) high-quality random numbers service.

Design requirements for our service were:

1. true randomnessof data served (high per-bit-entropy of served data)
2. high speedof data generation and serving
3. high availabilityof the service (including easy and transparent access to random data,
4. great robustnessof the service, and
5. high securityfor users that require it.

So far, all these features, except the last one, have been implemented.
And the solution developed tops other currently available random number acquisition methods (including existing Internet services) in at least one of the numbered categories.

To ensure high-quality of the supplied random numbers (true randomness) and high speed of serving, we have used fast non-deterministic, stand-alone hardware number generator relying on photonic emission in semiconductors. The used Quantum Random Bit Generatorwas previously developed at Rudjer Boskovic Institute, in Laboratory for Stochastic Signals and Process Research (for details, see below).
To achieve high availability of the service, several network access modes are developed, or shall be developed. These include transparent acquisition of random numbers using C/C++ libraries, web services (access over the SOAP protocol), and Mathematica/MATLAB client add-ons.
To enable high security, in future, SSL protocolshall be supported, i.e. all data shall be encrypted, at users request, with user/service certificates.

More information on: http://random.irb.hr/