Hardware RNGs are overrated

I remember being at a major computer science conference about 10 years ago, where one of the keynotes was a luminary describing his current favourite theoretical encryption system. I don't remember any of the details, but the take-home message was that with the only (or main) assumption of a publicly broadcast stream of high quality random numbers (and lots of them), the system was provably secure - even in the face of adversaries who are assumed to have perfect eavesdropping and infinite cpu, infinite memory, and even infinite time (ie. willing to wait as long as it takes, even millenia). I should really try to dig out the details, since this scheme seems relevant to the original article...