What is the most secure seed for random number generation?

Question

What are the most secure sources of entropy to seed a random number generator? This question is language and platform independent and applies to any machine on a network.

Answer 1

Your most secure methods will come from nature. That is to say, something that happens outside of your computer system and beyond our ability to predict it's patterns.

For instance, many researchers into Cryptographically secure PRNGs will use radioactive decay as a model, others might look into fractals, and so forth. There are existing means of creating true RNGs

One of my favorite ways of implementing a PRNG is from user interaction with a computer. For instance, this post was not something that could be pre-determined by forward-engineering from my past series of posts. Where I left my mouse on my screen is very random, the trail it made is also random. Seeing from user-interactions is. Abuse from the means of providing specific input such that specific numbers are generated could be mitigated by using a 'swarm' of user inputs and calculating it's 'vector', as long as you do not have every user in your system as an Eve, you should be fine. This is not suitable for many applications, as your pool of numbers is directly proportional to user input. Implementing this may have it's own issues.

People interested in RNG have already done things such as:

1. Use a web cam, whatever the random blips in the screen hash out to, when that truck passes by, that's all random data.
2. As mentioned already, radiation
3. Atmosphere
4. User interaction (as mentioned)
5. What's going on within the system EDG.

Secure seeds come from nature.

edit: Based on what you're looking at doing, I might suggest using an aggregation of your cloud server's EDG.