NIST Randomness Beacon

A wrapper for the NIST Randomness Beacon 'cause sometimes you need to get a 512-bit full-entropy bit-string programmatically. You never know.

Inspiration: http://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/nist-randomness-beacon/

NIST project description: http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/ct/nist_beacon.cfm

API Description: https://beacon.nist.gov/home

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'nist_randomness_beacon'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install nist_randomness_beacon

Usage

require 'nist_randomness_beacon'
client = NISTRandomnessBeacon::Client.new
record = client.last
# => NISTRandomnessBeacon::Record
record.output_value
# => "4838827EDEE67CD5F58139933709764D1C51B4FC362DCAAB06B1572AC533F15F648F5EA98C5276187EBB87148852AEE291DB735F821CDC04E53DD7331AB1D3B6"

# Pass an optional time to initialize:
three_days = 3 * 24 * 60 * 60
client = NISTRandomnessBeacon::Client.new(Time.now - three_days)
record = client.current
record.output_value
# => "1B080E1C3B8A8A0FFA51831B1F830D23CE66C2FF47BF35361CF05D8095CA0AFC69A78D6711774C2653108CA355C3EA4A63926655452048A4B211BC871FC812F8"

WARNING: DO NOT USE BEACON-GENERATED VALUES AS SECRET CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEYS. See this StackExchange thread.

Documentation

You can generate docs locally with the command rake yard.

You can view the docs for the latest release at RubyDoc.info.

Contributing

Pull requests welcome! Please see the contribution guide.

License

MIT License

Some documents were produced and provided by NIST.