The U.S. start-up Cryptosat has taken the EPFL developed Drand protocol, the internet's first production grade, publicly verifiable randomness beacon, into space for an historic experiment. Is space the next frontier for data security here on Earth? Researchers at the U.S. satellite start-up, Cryptosat , think it will be and they have just launched several experiments from the International Space Station (ISS) to test this. One of these experiments showcased the EPFL developed Drand Randomness Beacon, security technology that emerged from distributed randomness research by Associate Professor, Bryan Ford and his colleagues at EPFL's Decentralized and Distributed Systems Lab (DEDIS) in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences . They developed the foundations underlying the Drand protocol, a distributed, bias resistant, unpredictable, always-on and publicly-verifiable source of randomness whose output is produced by the League of Entropy , a diverse and active network of independent parties committed to publicly producing good randomness. But why is randomness so important and why the need for these experiments in space? Randomness plays a vital role in nearly every aspect of our daily lives from voting systems and traffic management to financial services. Where randomness has been insecure or exploitable there are cases where hackers have been able to rig lotteries or elections by influencing the randomness of the system. Randomness also plays an especially important role in internet security.
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