Questions tagged [random-number-generator]
A random number generator is a software or hardware solution which functions as a generator of (real or pseudo) random numbers (or bits).
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Is modern encryption needlessly complicated?
RSA, DES, AES, etc., all use (relatively) complicated mathematics to encrypt some message with some key. For each of these methods, there have been several documented vulnerabilities found over the ...
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Who uses Dual_EC_DRBG?
Recent news articles have suggested that the NSA may be involved in trying to influence the cryptography in public standards or commercially deployed software, to enable the NSA to decrypt the ...
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What is the difference between CSPRNG and PRNG?
What is the difference between CSPRNG and PRNG?
Is there performance differential between them? For example: We use PRNG for key generation which is very expensive and CSPRNG for IV/nonce in block ...
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What does it mean for a random number generator to be cryptographically secure?
I've never heard a good answer. I'd like to hear details about:
What are the criteria that make an RNG cryptographically secure?
Why must your RNG be cryptographically secure? I.e., what are the ...
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Explaining weakness of Dual EC DRBG to wider audience?
I have an audience of senior (non-technical) executives and senior technical people who are taking the backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG and considering it as a weakness of Elliptic curves in general. I can ...
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Why do some people believe that humans are "bad at" generating random numbers/characters like this?
I'm not even sure if they are serious, but I've heard many times that some people refuse to not only trust their computer to generate a random string (which is understandable) but also don't trust ...
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The GCD strikes back to RSA in 2019 - Good randomness is the only solution?
When someone collects lots of RSA public modulus, the first thing that comes to mind is;
$$\text{GCD them all}$$
If you calculate the GCD of two different RSA modulus and if the result is not 1 then ...
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What is the practical impact of using System.Random which is not cryptographically random?
I recently noticed a .NET software using PBKDF to derive an encryption key from a password string. This password string was ...
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Blum Blum Shub vs. AES-CTR or other CSPRNGs
Following on from D.W.'s comments on a previous question, what properties does Blum Blum Shub have that make it better / worse than other PRNGs? Are there significant implementation difficulties or ...
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How to fairly select a random number for a game without trusting a third party?
Several people are playing a game with random events and require a way to produce a random number. (Such as dice rolls or a lottery.)
Can this be done such that each player has the power to be ...
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Can you use memory errors as a source of randomness for cryptography?
Obviously, if you need a random number for cryptography, your code should use an api that gets it from hardware. However, not all hardware has a SRNG available. If you are working on a security ...
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Is HMAC-DRBG or Hash-DRBG stronger?
Out of the two deterministic random bit generators defined in section 10.1 of NIST SP 800-90A (i.e. based on hash functions), which one is cryptographically stronger?
Hash-DRBG (Section 10.1.1)
HMAC-...
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Could RDRAND (Intel) compromise entropy?
I was recently discussing the issue of RDRAND in Intel chips and the whole issue about how NSA could potentially be influencing Intel to weaken or create backdoors in their design.
This petition was ...
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How Brittle Are LCG-Cracking Techniques?
There are published techniques for cracking LCGs, but to my eye those techniques seem very brittle — very minor changes can add nonlinearity that renders techniques like the LLL algorithm unusable. ...
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Is openssl rand command cryptographically secure?
I'm wondering if the openssl rand command produces cryptographically secure random bytes. For example when in need for a random password or token:
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What tests can I do to ensure my random number generator is working correctly?
In the past I have used the Chi-squared test to check the statistical randomness of my generator. Is this a good test to use? Are there other tests?
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Are the SHA family hash outputs practically random?
Say I hashed the output from a random number generator (with nonce), would the resulting SHA256 hash be as random as the inputted number?
And If I used the first 5 hex characters, and then used the ...
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Why are PRNG in programming languages not cryptographically secure by default?
In most programming languages, there is a module or function in the stdlib for creating random output like random.random() in Python.
Because those functions use a ...
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What stops the Multiply-With-Carry RNG from being a Cryptographically Secure PRNG?
Despite the fact that Marsaglia's MWC PRNG (multiply-with-carry random number generator) is considered to be "the mother of all RNGs", it does not seem to be considered to be a CSPRNG (...
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Is it safe to seed a random number generator from system time?
It seemed to me that the Bouncy Castle SecureRandom class for C#/.NET only uses DateTime.Now.Ticks as its seed by default.
I ...
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A website that identifies an RNG from its output
This happened during a discussion of RNG entropy, and the difficulty of verifying the level of entropy in a long sequence of bits (e.g. a private key.)
A colleague of mine told me about a website ...
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Where do Windows applications get entropy from?
Where does the entropy that cryptographic .NET libraries use for encryption come from? I know with Linux you can use /dev/random, but does a similar pool exist ...
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Webcam random number generator
I have a question about random number generators.
I have read from a real random number generator, based on a webcam ("randcam"). My problem is, that I do not really understand how the generation of ...
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Would it be secure to use random numbers from random.org in a cryptographic solution?
Random.org provides true random numbers through an unsecured web service. Since these numbers would be transmitted in plaintext could they still be considered useful as true random numbers while ...
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Examples of frauds discovered because someone tried to mimic a random sequence [closed]
[Moderator note: this question now lives there]
So, I'm preparing a talk about the well known fact that humans are bad at the task of generating uniformly random sequences of numbers when asked to do ...
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Can we assume that a hash function with high collision resistance also means a highly uniform distribution?
I want to use a hash function to generate a random sequence from number 0-n. And so I would like to find a good function that results in values that are seemingly random (does not need to be secure), ...
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Can we use a Cryptographic hash function to generate infinite random numbers?
I have seen that there are PRNG that can generate a specific number of random-numbers. The Mersenne Twister as an example, can generate 2**19937 (if I'm not wrong) but... can we use a cryptographic ...
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Creating a small number from a random octet string
I'm trying to figure out the best way to generate a cryptographically secure random number between 0 and 200 (inclusive) from a cryptographically secure random string of bytes (ie. read from /dev/...
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What to watch for with openssl generating weak keys? (low entropy)
(Disclaimer: I am regular software engineer with only basic crypto knowledge, so helpful if can be explained for a layman.)
I am concerned about generating weak keys on a shared linux box with ...
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Why did NIST remove The Lempel-Ziv Compression test from the Statistical Test Suite?
NIST removed "The Lempel-Ziv Compression" test from the Statistical Test Suite in revision 2008 and above and has not incorporated it since – see revision 2010.
Why was it removed? Does it no longer ...
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Can a LFSR be cryptographically secure?
I have been looking at an embedded microcontroller which has a cryptographic hardware engine (in particular the PIC32MZ family). These devices have what they advertise as a cryptographically secure ...
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Is there a cryptographic algorithm that can make a "lottery ticket"?
With public-key cryptography, I know Alice can "seal" a message that only Bob can open. But in that case, Alice knows the message that she is sealing.
What if Alice wants to seal a random ...
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Quality of randomness on a Linux system with haveged
Has anyone checked if using haveged, a Linux daemon which uses the HAVEGE algorithm, changes the non-deterministic properties of the random data from ...
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AMD's implementation of RDRAND instruction
The latest AMD programmer manuals, dated June 2015, include the RDRAND instruction in the instruction set. For completeness, it lacks ...
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What is the difference between TRNG and CSPRNG?
I understand the output of a TRNG is almost impossible to reproduce, such a flipping a coin 100 times to produce a 100-bit sequence. However, it is also my understanding that a CSPRNG produces an ...
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Predicting values from a Linear Congruential Generator
I have learnt that Linear Congruential Random Number Generators are not cryptographically secure - my understanding is that given an LCG of the form:
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Entropy of two concatenated random values
In this Intel blog posting, the author claims:
The amount of work required to brute-force predict a random value that has n bits of entropy is $O(2^n)$. If you concatenate two values together, the ...
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Properties of PRNG / Hashes?
There are a lot of quite elaborate PRNG's out there (e.g. Mersenne Twister et.al.), and they have some important properties, especially when it comes to crypto applications.
So, I was wondering how ...
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Mixing Entropy Sources by XOR?
Assume that I have two sources of entropy (say, a hardware RNG and a CSPRNG) and that the two sources are independent (do not know anything about the internal state of the other RNG). Can I mix them ...
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How random are commercial TRNGS
I'm thinking about buying a USB TRNG. How do I evaluate its randomness? I'm sure some are better than others but which is which? Are thermal-noise better than radio-noise TRNGs?
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Can machine learning analyze random number generator?
I'm studying for random number generators(RNG) and I saw about machine learning a few days ago.
So I searched analysis of RNG using machine learning.
But I couldn't find such fields.
Are there such ...
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Can I encrypt a message by swapping bits in the text?
I have tried out an encryption method, in which I swap bits in the text.
The text length is N bit, then I generate several random number pairs in the range 0..N-1, as [n,k] pairs. After that, I swap ...
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Can any block cipher in CTR mode be used as a CSPRNG?
I have been learning about block ciphers, modes of operations, and csprngs by myself for a few days and there are some things I'm unsure about.
Assuming we only talk about cryptographically secure ...
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Uniformly distributed secure floating point numbers in [0,1)
Is there any way to generate
cryptographically secure
uniformly distributed
floating point numbers in the interval [0,1)?
For example, in Javascript, there is ...
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What issues are there while using Linux's /dev/urandom for generating cryptographic keys?
As of Linux 5.1 the /dev/random no longer uses the blocking pool. There is a talk about the change on the page Removing the Linux /dev/random blocking pool
I ...
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Is CPU timing jitter a usable entropy source?
In some virtualized environments, the only source of entropy available is CPU timing jitter. Can one get enough entropy from this source for practical uses? Also, is this secure against local side-...
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Cracking a PRNG by observing ranks within groups of its output
Suppose that I am generating random numbers with Python's random module, so that there is a known random number generator (Mersenne Twister in this case). I've ...
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How are random numbers for RSA generated? [duplicate]
The RSA public key encryption requires two very large prime numbers as part of its encryption process that serve as secrets. These are typically generated with cryptographically secure random number ...
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Does using modulo (%) affect quality of randomness?
I'm writing a small script that generates random non-signed decimal integers within a certain range of values. I'm using GNU od, with the following command:
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How broken is a xor of two LCGs?
Suppose we define a PRG as the xor of two LCGs modulo a 64-bit prime: something like the following Python code.
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