random numbers
LLMs Generate Predictable Passwords
LLMs are bad at generating passwords: There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily: All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost ...
NIST’s CURBy Uses Quantum to Verify Randomness of Numbers
Scientists with NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder developed CURBy, a system that can verify the randomness of strings of numbers, which will add more protection to encrypted data in the ...
Coin Flips Are Biased
Experimental result: Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test ...
Bounty to Recover NIST’s Elliptic Curve Seeds
This is a fun challenge: The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds ...
On the Randomness of Automatic Card Shufflers
Many years ago, Matt Blaze and I talked about getting our hands on a casino-grade automatic shuffler and looking for vulnerabilities. We never did it—I remember that we didn’t even try very ...
Breaking Randomness in the Ethereum Universe [part 1]
It is widely acknowledged that generating secure random numbers on the Ethereum blockchain is difficult due to its deterministic nature. Each time a smart contract’s function is called inside of a transaction, ...
